On-Line HCI Resources: A Community Forum to Assess Needs
Panelists: Hans de Graaff, KPN Research, j.j.degraaff@acm.org
Mikael Ericsson, Linkopings Universitet, miker@ida.liu.se
Keith Instone, Director of Usable Web, instone@usableweb.com
Gary Perlman, Director of HCIBIB, director@hcibib.org liffick@cs.millersv.edu Ben Shneiderman, University of Maryland, ben@cs.umd.edu
ABSTRACT
Many human-computer interaction (HCI) professionals have attempted to develop on-line resources for the HCI community, ranging from extensive bibliographies of HCI literature to sites devoted to Web development or educational materials. However, some consider even these resources themselves to be "bad examples of good HCI." Panelists, each of whom have developed significant on-line HCI sites, will discuss the good, the bad, and the ugly of their own sites as a way of assessing the needs of the HCI community and on-line resources. In addition, they will discuss whether there is indeed a "community" at all that they are attempting to serve.
KEYWORDS
Human-computer interaction, on-line resources, world wide web.
OVERVIEW
All panelists have been involved in attempting to set up some type of on-line resource as an aid to the HCI "community." These efforts have been extensive and on-going for several years. But have they been successful? As measured by what criteria? Panelists will discuss how they developed their on-line resource, what their users have found most interesting and useful, what things generate interest in users, the problems they've encountered in developing their sites, and what obstacles continue to plague their plans. They will describe their views on the current and future needs of their users, and their plans for meeting those needs. Questions facing the panelists include: (1) Just who is the community(s) of users whose needs we are trying to meet with our resources? (2) Is there really an on-line "community" at all, or is it wishful thinking? (3) What are the HCI resources that these users need? (4) Do current resources meet any of those needs? (5) Although these HCI resource sites seem to get a lot of "hits", why do so few people actually contribute content to them, or respond directly to them in any way?
In discussing this issue with the panelists, it became clear that all of us are frustrated with the current state of affairs with respect to on-line HCI resources, both as those attempting to develop useful sites and as users of other sites. While there is some concensus that problems still exist in the medium itself, there is significant controversy about the nature of the lack of participation of others in the HCI field in the on-going development of on-line resources. Most of the resource sites invite users to actively participate in the development of the site, rather than be just passive consumers of information. These attempts range from requesting help in identifying dead links to invitations to submit significant content. The experiences of the panelists, however, is that few people get involved even in the simplest forms of communication with a site's developer. Interaction appears to be mostly limited to one-way information feeding of "consumers." Site developers are left combing through the residue left by site visitors (e.g. page hits) in an effort to tease out useful information about who users are, what they are interested in, and how useful the information actually is to them. This is clearly an inadequate way of getting useful information about their users' needs. Panelists will discuss these frustrations, along with an attempt at looking for some methods for overcoming such problems.
The panel format will include
Blaise W. Liffick
Blaise Liffick is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Millersville University of Pennsylvania. He is the Director of the Adaptive Computing Laboratory at Millersville, which is devoted to undergraduate education in human-computer interaction. For the past two years he has been the Director of the HCI Educators' Resource Site sponsored by Addison Wesley Longman (http://www.awl.com/dtui), which is devoted to providing materials for HCI education.
Hans de Graaff
Hans de Graaff has maintained the HCI Index from 1993 onwards. Most of this period coincided with his PhD work at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. Currently working at KPN Research, he still maintains the HCI Index in his spare time.
Starting out from my own list of HCI bookmarks, the HCI Index has grown to a list of ~400 links to a diverse range of materials related to HCI. Currently the HCI Index receives some 300 hits per day. During the last two years not many changes have been made to the Index. One of the reasons is that it has become quite hard to find suitable on-line resources on HCI. It used to be that using a search engine on the web would return all interesting sites with a simple query for HCI. These days this isn't possible, because most of the sites returned are just small lists of other resources. Only a few sites contain actual useful content. This leaves two other options for adding new material to the my HCI Index. It may be announced somewhere, either on a mailing list, newsgroup, or in a publication like Interactions. People may also tell me about it, and while this does happen, it doesn't happen enough. Moreover, there are hardly any people who do this more than once. Clearly, while the HCI Index may have a following of people checking it on a regular basis, it does not really foster a community.
To make the HCI Index a more valuable resource for a community, I believe three changes need to be made. First, more information needs to be added to each resource; for instance a brief summary of each linked site would allow users to gauge whether the resource will be useful to them without visiting. Second, the information must easily allow many different viewpoints on the resources, rather than just the one chosen by the site manager. Third, this opens up the way for one viewpoint that I think is important to provide: an overview of the complete field of HCI, and list of all or key resources on each of the topics within HCI.
Mikael Ericsson
Mikael Ericsson is a PhD candidate working as a teacher and consultant in interaction design. He has developed and run the "HCI Resources on the Net"- site since 1993. The site attracts approximately 700 visits per day and provides indices to other material as well as original content. It is run completely as a spare time project.
The web has a large potential as a mediator, facilitator and medium for excellence/knowledge management for a community like ours. There is a lot of HCI-content out there already, but the full potential of the medium is not used. Our community needs to be involve more in the use and development of on-line resources in order to further develop itself.
On-line services make it possible to accumulate knowledge, experience and ideas, to communicate our results and ideas faster, to achieve fast peer reviewing, to increase contact and communication between researchers and practitioners. There are many existing services proving or showing the potential of these concepts. However, one should consider the following - do we really have an HCI community on-line? We seem to be reluctant to use some services (for different reasons: e.g., copyright, prestige, time, tradition). There is largely a mismatch between the content and the user profile/needs/goals. Perhaps we haven't managed to build services that fit our needs? In some cases, the resources of today are bad examples of good HCI! In order to develop further and expand the HCI community on-line (as well as off-line), we must use the existing services, make them usable and innovate new use.
Keith Instone
I have been involved in on-line HCI resources ever since I started the "HCI Launching Pad" in 1993. As an avid collector of links, it was my way of sharing what I had found. It was little more than self-published bookmarks, organized into a few categories and with a small description for each.
In 1994, the Launcing Pad was christened the "HCI Virtual Library" and included in the World-Wide-Web-Consortium-sponsored Virtual Library. Back then, before the search engines were commercialized, the hand-made indexes were one of the preferred ways to find things on the Internet. Besides being a better name, HCI VL provided my index with some legitimacy and pushed "HCI" out of the bowels of computer science, within the Virtual Library table of contents, at least.
Over the next few years, job and free-time constraints changed and I found it harder and harder to do a good job with the HCI Virtual Library. My counter- parts were continuing to do an excellent job, so I decided to change HCI VL to fit my new workstyle (busier) in 1996. I turned it into a meta-index of HCI sites. the new HCI VL reviewed and ranked other HCI indexes. At about this same time, my interests were focusing on the World Wide Web completely, so I decided to expand my Web/HCI index that I was doing for SIGCHI and start
Usable Web. Usable Web is an entire site devoted to indexing, sorting, and evaluating resources that cover the intersection of the Web and HCI. I used many of the lessons I had learned from HCI VL to build a database of resources and to generate pages dynamically.
Alas, over time, even the meta-index HCI VL was more than I wanted to bother with, so in the summer of 1998 I started forwarding all traffic to SIGCHI's list of links. Today, the exact future of the "Human-Computer Interaction Virtual Library" is unclear and will be shaped by discussion at this panel.
In my opinion, we need more "niche" sites with very specific HCI content acting as "bridges" to people who are not familiar with the field. An example of this kind of site is Good Documents (http://www.gooddocuments.com/). It is focused on helping people write better documents for intranets and includes many cases of how to apply HCI techniques for this domain.
Gary Perlman
The idea for the HCI Bibliography (HCIBIB) started with an on-line bibliography for a curriculum module on UI Development prepared for the Software Engineering Institute in 1988. I thought the resource was useful because it had abstracts of articles and tables of contents of books. It had 196 records. I had the idea that a distributed group project could coordinate gathering bibliographic records, possibly with authors contributing abstracted entries out of self-interest. Although that did not work for a variety of reasons, people were generally supportive of the idea, and the project started releasing files in 1992 primarily based on work-study student and later OCR input.
Around the same time, the HILITES project was trying to move from a research project into a commercial "Information Service for the World HCI Community" (Shackel et al, 1992). I sent a survey to about 500 registered user/sites and concluded that HILITES was priced out of the reach of most users, especially when matched up against a free service like the HCI Bibliography (even though it offered less coverage and fewer services). HILITES disappeared.
Integrating links to Web resources and to full text do not really require much insight or expertise. They are simply information to be added to records (although potentially more volatile than information about more traditional forms of publication). More difficult to estimate are the ways of better supporting research in HCI, itself a research area far broader than HCI. Some active areas of work include search assistance (e.g. suggesting possible next steps to improve the search) and annotation support (to annotate records, merge annotations and records, etc).
Measuring success in these areas is difficult. Subjective satisfaction may be high even though important information has been missed (either inside or outside the database coverage). There is also the problem of making X% of the information so much more accessible than the other 100-X% that the remainder is never found by many researchers. Search engines, data visualizations, and the like will continue to improve, but many users are not finding the information they hope for, and they are not using it as effectively as possible.
Ben Shneiderman
Current HCI websites provide valuable information for professionals and researchers. More can be done to make these websites more effective, but I think it is time to broaden our vision and expand our community by reaching out to others. Putting up the websites is only the first step; publicity to make them visible to others is a necessary complementary activity.
Some possible directions are:
Ben Shneiderman is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science, Head of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory, and Member of the Institutes for Advanced Computer Studies and for Systems Research, all at the University of Maryland at College Park. He is the author of Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction (1987, second edition 1992, third edition 1998), Addison Wesley Longman Publishers, Reading, MA.
References
Shackel. et al (1992) "HILITES -- The Information Service for the World HCI Community" SIGCHI Bulletin, 1992 24:3 40-49.