Usenet Newsgroups and Frequently Asked/Answered Questions on HCI

ACM interactions, Volume 1, No. 4, pp. 7-8.

Gary Perlman, Ohio State University

The most relevant links are listed under Newsgroups and General Indexes

Table of Contents

In the previous issue of interactions (interactions, vol. 1, no. 3, pp. 9-10), I introduced you to browsing HCI on the World-Wide Web (WWW). In this, the second of a series of Departments on Resources for HCI developers, researchers, educators, and students, I'll introduce you to some usenet newsgroups and FAQs on HCI. The FAQs are your best resource for finding out more information about HCI, and represent the efforts of dozens or even hundreds of experts.

Usenet Newsgroups: Not a Complete Waste of Time

Usenet newsgroups are carried by thousands of UNIX and other machines around the world and are available via most internet services. There are many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of newsgroups on subjects ranging from anthropology to nanotechnology. Although people can spend all their time reading and posting to news, and although the signal-to-noise ratio can be low, there are interesting and useful discussions in some newsgroups. The comp (short for computer) and sci (short for science) hierarchies contain the newsgroups most relevant to HCI. For some, there is a FAQ list that provides a digest of most of the wisdom of a newsgroup. The comp newsgroups will be discussed along with their FAQs.

The sci.psychology newsgroup covers issues on perceptual, cognitive, and other areas of psychology. The sci.cognitive newsgroup covers cognitive science, including issues from AI, psychology, philosophy, linguistics, and other fields. Both these newsgroups would be of interest to those interested in the foundations or theory of HCI.

Just the FAQs, Please

In the daily routine of reading dozens of newsgroups, bulletin boards, and mailing lists, an experienced consumer of online information will see the same questions over and over again. This has irritated some people, but motivated others to develop FAQ lists, list of Frequently Asked (or Answered) Questions. (There is no correct pronunciation of FAQ; some people say the latters F-A-Q, while others pronounce it as a single syllable that rhymes with back, so that the plural sounds a bit like facts.)

There are some guidelines for the design of FAQs, but these are not universally followed. The main idea in a FAQ list is that recurring questions are gathered, and authoritative answers are supplied (perhaps after some electronic debate). The maintainer of the FAQ periodically updates the list and posts updates to relevant newsgroups, mailing lists, etc. The result is that people looking for information about a field can benefit from the efforts of many experts in the field. Both novices and experts can find useful information; novices are directed to the FAQ when they ask a frequently-asked question (e.g., I am looking for papers on X. Any ideas?), while experts (i.e., people who should know about the FAQ) are reminded of its existence. Frequent users of FAQs know to refer to the relevant FAQs when asking a question (e.g., I checked all the sources pointed to by the FAQ, but I could not find any information on Y.).

The Key HCI Newsgroups and FAQs

The most relevant usenet newsgroup for HCI is comp.human-factors. Elizabeth Buie at the Computer Sciences Corporation, describes the charter of comp.human-factors in the first answer in the FAQ for the newsgroup: "The newsgroup comp.human-factors focuses on the discovery and application of human factors information to the design of systems, software, hardware, and environments related to the use of computers." A related newsgroup, comp.cog-eng on cognitive engineering (which might be thought of as an applied version of sci.cognitive), has not had many postings since the creation of comp.human-factors. The comp.human-factors FAQ is maintained by Edgar Matias at the University of Toronto. It is browsable on the Web. The HCI FAQ contains twelve general questions (e.g., What is HCI about? What are some good books/journals to read?), fourteen specific questions (e.g., questions about keyboards, human memory limits, user interface design), and pointers to three related FAQs, described below.

The comp.groupware newsgroup is concerned with groupware, and according to question 5 in the comp.groupware FAQ guidelines file: "Groupware is software and hardware for shared interactive environments." (The answer goes on to define shared, interactive, and environments.) The comp.groupware FAQ is available by anonymous ftp at rtfm.mit.edu (internet id 18.181.0.24) in the directory /pub/usenet/comp.groupware. It is maintained by David Stodolsky of Copenhagen University. It contains pointers to bibliographic information on groupware, a list of groupware products, and answers to specific questions.

The newsgroup comp.windows.misc is about programming windowing interfaces in general (not just Microsoft Windows). The Platform-Independent GUI (PIGUI) toolkit FAQ is available via anonymous from at rtfm.mit.edu (internet id 18.181.0.24) in the directory /pub/usenet/comp.windows.misc. The PIGUI FAQ is maintained by Wade Guthrie at Rockwell. It contains a list of tools for writing Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) that are portable to a variety of platforms (e.g., Motif, Mac, Windows) and tables comparing the tools. (Recently, Brad Myers at Carnegie Mellon University announced a compilation of user interface development tools, a pointer to which will probably be added to the HCI and possibly the PIGUI FAQs.)

The Typing Injury FAQ is posted monthly to the comp.human-factors newsgroup, and is also available by anonymous ftp at soda.berkeley.edu (internet is 128.32.149.19) in the directory /pub/typing-injury/typing-injury-faq. It is maintained by Dan Wallach at Princeton University (and others) It contains information about the causes, remedies for, and ways to avoid typing injuries. The ftp site contains many other files on the topic.

Your Next Step

Download the current version of the comp.human-factors FAQ and look through its table of contents. If the FAQ helps you out, send a complimentary note to the maintainer. If it does not, send a suggestion and others will benefit from it.

Next resources department: User Interface Guidelines and Standards

Links on this Page