Info & Interaction Design, Audience

Mick McQuaid

2024-09-07

Week THREE

But first … Draw a face

• It was supposed to convince you that you can draw
• Some of you didn’t need it
• Some of you didn’t submit examples of good design!
• Some needed better scans
• Some need the exercises in Dodson (2006)

Crazy Eights

Annotated! And speedy!

This example included not only after the fact annotation but a lot of additional frames in the time it took most students to complete one page. Ordinarily I don’t preach annotations but I think that, if you have extra time, it helps to document your work. Speed is the priority, though, always.

Easy to understand at a glance

On the other hand, here’s one that needs no annotation. We can easily understand it at a glance.

Pencil or not?

I originally encouraged starting with pencil and going over it, but now I think it’s better to just start with Sharpie and make erasure impossible. If you run into trouble that requires erasure, just start over on a new page. This attitude change arises from the notion that speed is the highest priority in this exercise.

Audience

Academic Communities

• Human Factors in Schools of Engineering
• Human Computer Interaction in Schools of Computer Science & in iSchools
• Management Information Systems in Schools of Business

The topic has been studied by three main academic communities, human factors in schools of engineering, human computer interaction in computer science schools, and management information systems in b-schools. Each of the three has specialized to some extent but there are overlaps.

Human Factors

• People operating complex machines
  • automobiles
  • ships
  • planes
  • nuclear reactors
• Reaction time
• Situational awareness
• Split-second decision making

Human factors is usually the experimental study of how people operate complex machines like automobiles, ships, nuclear reactors, and aircraft. Since the researchers who identify themselves this way are usually funded by the military, they emphasize military applications although their findings are usually applicable to some degree outside the military.

Human Computer Interaction

• Evolved from ideal user to communities
• Started by cognitive psychologists
• First home was in computer science

Human computer interaction was, until recently, primarily the study of one person interacting with one computer system. This field began with the study of users of expensive computers performing specialized work tasks. At this time, researchers mainly studied how the user interface affected some measure of productivity, usually in laboratory studies. The second period of human computer interaction research studied how people interact casually with computers. This involved field studies with very small groups of participants (formerly called users) and very limited conclusions, appropriate to the increased pace of change in user interfaces.

Management Information Systems

• Adoption of technological innovation
• Diffusion of technological innovation
• Always in productive organization context
• Concerned with management of technology

Management Information Systems is professed in some business schools, and has long been concerned with the adoption and diffusion of technological innovation in productive organizations. This concern has led to many psychological studies of groups of users of information systems in organizations.

Epochs in Human Computer Interaction

• The idealized individual
• The casual individual
• Workgroups
• Ubiquitous Computing
• Communities of Practice
• Communities of Place

It’s easier to identify past epochs than current ones. It appears that human computer interaction has diverged into two areas in the current era but the distinction is harder to be certain of without the advantage of years of hindsight. The two current branches appear to be ubiquitous computing and computing communities.

Ubiquitous computing is an old term referring to computers embedded in other devices and able to communicate with each other. When first coined by Marc Weiser around 1991 (see Weiser (1991)), the term meant anything that was not a desktop computer and concerned a small, well-defined community. Today, almost no interaction between computers and people can be defined with respect to only a desktop computer, rendering the original definition moot. Now it seems to encompass all computing.

Community computing is not a broadly used term by itself. I am using it here to refer to the change in focus from a single person (formerly a user) to many people forming a community. Two types of communities exist, communities that occur in computer networks and communities that exist in the physical world. Since the latter may share sewers, electrical utilities, telecommunications utilities, roads, schools, local governments, and other aspects of physical infrastructure, it differs greatly from a network-only community such as Facebook.

Communities that can function remotely, such as Facebook, are the focus of study of Social Network Analysis and Data Science, closely related fields whose work is enabled by monitoring electronic communication networks.

Communities that exist in physical space, such as neighborhoods and cities, are obviously the subject of study of architects, social workers, and people in many other disciplines. Recently, many of these researchers and their sponsors have aligned with computer scientists identified with human computer interaction.

Note that the above bifurcation is a matter of opinion. Many different perspectives exist about how to divide the academic community, such as the tracks of CHI. Most of the perspectives that I (Mick) have encountered divide the community into a very large number of segments. You should develop your own perspective with exposure to the community.

Industrial and Government Communities

You want me to deprioritize my current reports until you advise of a status upgrade?

Make these your primary action items.

— dialog from Fight Club, 1999

That’s dialog from Fight Club (1999), a film which highlights the dystopian features of business and a violent reaction to them.

The business world has its own language of businessspeak, as we see in this quote from Fight Club. It is difficult for academics to understand and convey the meaning behind this strange language. But we try.

Suppliers of IT

Who are suppliers of IT today? How do you measure? Public awareness? Market Capitalization? What industry codes are applicable?

The most influential suppliers are those with interface guidelines for public-facing apps that you may choose to follow or reject: Google, Apple, Microsoft. But there is a wide world outside Silicon Valley as well, so it makes sense to think about suppliers in broader terms. Even within Silicon Valley there are CRM and ERP vendors who determine interaction guidelines for large swaths of b2b computing yet receive little public attention.

Customers of IT

This group can best be defined by students.

Historical perspective, revisited

• idealized user
• casual user
• workgroup
• groups in general
• ambient computing

A historical perspective might divide the study of HCI into several periods. The first period could be characterized by costly computers, nondiscretionary users, and the struggle to improve the speed and quality of productive output of computing, led by Herbert Simon and Allan Newell at Carnegie-Mellon. The second period could be characterized by a focus on human concerns, discretionary use and better adapting the computer to suit an imperfect person. The third period could be characterized by a focus on workgroups, groups in general, and computing within human activities where computers may not be the focus. Finally, the current period could be characterized by a focus on communities of place and the role of computing in the fabric of everyday life.

Idealized user

The idealized user was studied intensively by Herbert Simon and his associates at Carnegie-Mellon. They broke tasks into very small components and investigated the state of mind of users at every moment.

On the right, you see a figure from one of their publications which has come to be called Baby Bubblehead and which represents the idealized user. Notice that Baby Bubblehead is pushing a button and this action is associated with timed cognitive processes that can be examined minutely.

Nondiscretionary use

• Labor was cheap
• Machines were expensive
• Therefore, make labor more efficient

When computers were individually expensive, HCI professionals, like others, were focused on making the best use of the very expensive time of these machines. They sought to understand how and why time was wasted and what would be needed to waste less of it. For example, the IBM subsecond study found that people would lose their train of thought if the computer took more than roughly a second to respond to keystrokes. This led to the purchase of faster IBM computers but also had some positive effects.

Hierarchical collaboration

• 1980s
• Most HCI work funded by DoD
• Collaborating in rigidly defined hierarchies

During the 1980s, most academic HCI research was funded by the US Department of Defense. That organization was interested in using computers to collaborate within and across rigidly defined organizational hierarchies. Some HCI research during this period found that known organizational psychology phenomena could be instantiated in software to achieve desired group dynamics.

Workgroup cooperation

• Partly a reaction to DoD-funded research
• Partly a generalization
• Workgroups without a rigid hierarchy

The rise of networked computers in the 1980s and nineties led to a community of HCI researchers, coalesced around the Computer-Supported Cooperative Work conference, seeking answers to questions about groups of computer users without a specific hierarchical arrangement.

Discretionary computing

• Games
• Non-workplace activities
• Driven by falling price of computers

On the right is an advertising image for Doom, certainly the most important game in computing history. At one time, any device was defined as a general-purpose computer by many if it could play Doom.

As the price of computers has fallen, more and more HCI work has been focused on discretionary use of computers. This includes studies of games and other recreational, non-workplace activities.

Note that, although the price of an individual computer has fallen, their ubiquity has led to computing occupying a greater share of the cost of modern products. This fact was highlighted to me years ago when Mercedes claimed that three fifths of the cost of their very expensive cars was software.

Ubiquitous computing

• Mark Weiser’s famous article coined the term
• Raised awareness that cheap computers everywhere were the future
• Principles:
  • The purpose of a computer is to help you do something else.
  • The best computer is a quiet, invisible servant.
  • The more you can do by intuition the smarter you are; the computer should extend your unconscious.
  • Technology should create calm.

The term ubiquitous computing was coined over 25 years ago by a visionary named Mark Weiser. Unfortunately, Weiser died at a young age and the notion of ubiquitous computing floundered for a time. Nevertheless there has been a small stream of research on this topic since about 1991.

Communities of Practice

• E.g., radiologists adopting new technology
• Requires extensive knowledge of each discipline

Communities of practice were studied at the dawn of HCI within the study of nondiscretionary use of computing. By far the most famous study of a community of practice was the study by Barley of radiologists and their adoption of new technology. Elsewhere I have mentioned that Barley acquired an M.D. in the course of this, one of the most extensive ethnographic studies related to information technology.

Communities of Life

Community development, such as preached by Saul Alinsky, precedes the HCI community’s interest.

To distinguish between communities of practice and communities of life, let’s consider the phenomenon of community development which gained a higher media profile when a community organizer was elected President of the USA in 2008. Community development was again highlighted when a presidential candidate in 2012 claimed to have had a real job in contrast to the President’s job as a community organizer. Of course, mainstream media presents a confused picture of community organizers as socialists, terrorists, and even vegans.

A clearer picture of community development comes from speaking directly with community organizers, who can be found throughout the USA, especially in areas impacted by poverty. I (Mick) have been privileged to speak with a few and, although I have not read much of their literature, I am confident in describing one aspect of community development.

Communities and infrastructure

• housing
• health care facilities
• quality of air and water
• postal and shipping services
• roads
• other transportation facilities
• schools
• utilities
• waste removal
• sewage
• watershed maintenance

Communities are complicated, fragile entities. They depend on investment from businesses and the presence of productive enterprise. A number of factors can drive businesses away from a community and, when any of these factors appears, others are likely to follow. Collectively, we can call most of these factors deficiencies in infrastructure. Infrastructure includes housing, health care facilities, quality of air and water, postal and shipping services, roads, other transportation facilities, schools, utilities, waste removal, sewage, watershed maintenance, and probably several others.

The one thing I have omitted from the above list is people. Specifically, a community must have a high proportion of its members in the workforce, meaning that a high proportion of its members must be of an age, 18–65, to be eligible for the workforce. Children and the elderly need care and, if a community consists mainly of members in these age groups, who will care for them?

If any of the above infrastructure elements is missing, the others are threatened. Working age parents will often refuse to settle in otherwise attractive communities that lack highly-rated schools. Businesses can not meet their schedules in a community suffering frequent brownouts or blackouts.

Community organizers

• Work at a very small scale
• Are rarely successful at bringing families out of poverty
• Suffer from stovepiping

At the right, we see one community organizer who became very successful.

Community organizers are typically not very successful. One community organizer told me that, if she could help a single family out of poverty, she would consider it an important and infrequent accomplishment. If she could help a dozen families out of poverty, she would have a successful career. These are dauntingly small numbers.

Most efforts at community development suffer from a phenomenon named just like a somewhat similar problem in information technology, stovepiping. This means that any single initiative tackles one of the above infrastructure problems. The results are usually irrelevant to the health of the community as a whole because the complicated, interdependent relationships between the people and the infrastructure elements are more sensitive to damage than to repair. A substantial number of elements must be improved to support any given individual element.

It is very difficult to avoid stovepiping in community development as it is information technology. People usually have expertise in one domain, access to resources in one domain, and a mandate in one domain.

Upskilling as a community solution

• Risks depleting the community of employment age individuals
• Attracts industries that may not help the community

As an example, many community development efforts focus on improving skills of individuals to make them more employable. One problem with the jobs/skills approach is that historically it has actually weakened poverty-challenged communities, since programs like this are used by the brightest and fastest learners as an exit strategy from the community. One big challenge is how to add skills without creating an exodus from the community. There is no easy answer, but the jobs / skills focus might help if the skills have an immediate local application. The problem is that to keep the newly skilled you have to add roads, housing, sewers, fast internet access, cell-phone towers, and everything else that businesses need to move into the area and employ people locally.

One horrible example in my (Mick’s) experience is Tucson, AZ, which made the decision a long time ago to attract “call centers” that semi-retired military people there could work for part-time. These call centers became the biggest private industry in Tucson and they don’t train anybody to do much of anything, and they feature high turnover and low wages. Seniority is a problem for management because of demands for increasing wages with experience, so they routinely lay off the more experienced workers seasonally and bring them back with a new clock the following year.

Communities of place and HCI

• HCI history
• HCI has made a conscious decision to try to make a difference to communities
• High-profile HCI projects have struggled to make a difference to communities

All of the foregoing leads to a definition of communities of life as depending on a fragile, complicated network of physical infrastructure and working-age people for health. Notice that this is a normative definition of community. You may feel that it has delved too deeply into details for a course in human computer interaction. I assure you that, if anything, it does not provide enough details. The community of practice known as HCI has made a conscious and long-term decision throughout the past two decades to try to make a difference to communities of life. All too often, these efforts have led nowhere because of an inadequate appreciation of the details of challenges faced by communities of life. Many high-profile HCI projects have struggled for this reason and a few have enjoyed success. I’ll list a few examples.

1. A project in Kenya involving HCI students from Michigan was concerned with the uncertainty faced by small farmers selling milk at a distant market. Picture this: A small farmer trudges down a dusty road with a single animal laden with a couple of barrels of milk. Pretty soon, he is met by a man in distress. Through his tears, the man explains that the bottom has dropped out of the milk market from which he is returning and that he was forced to sell his milk as well as his only animal for almost nothing. He shows the farmer a pittance in his gnarled hand and walks on. Now the farmer is shaken and, before the piteous cries of the man have died away, he meets a jolly yokel. The yokel says that he is thinking about dairy farming and wants to buy an animal and some milk with the all the money he has saved. That amount turns out to be considerably less than the farmer had hoped for at market, but more than pitiful man had claimed to receive. So the farmer takes the small price and considers himself lucky, unsure whether he has been bilked by a pair of con men or has narrowly averted disaster.

The project realized that anyone could get a cell phone in this region and that even the poorest of the farmers had one. It was a small step from there to setting up a dial-in service (no, there was no wifi in this rural district) that texts the current market price of milk to a caller on even the most primitive cell phone. The farmer need not even be literate to take advantage of this system, just numerate.

2. A Ph.D. student in HCI at Stanford was funded to do a project with free cell phones in a rural district in India. She was herself Indian in origin, although she was operating in a completely unfamiliar state. These phones, running the old Symbian operating system, could support \(240\times160\) video. Her plan was to provide health education to illiterate pregnant women using the videos. She even persuaded local officials of a rank of approximately mayor (I don’t know the correct term) to record videos endorsing her project.

The project was a resounding failure because she did not understand household relations. The husband’s mother typically lived with the family and was the final authority on health care for the pregnant wife. By bypassing the mother-in-law and going directly to the pregnant woman, she believed she was appealing to a new generation more open to contemporary health practices. Instead, she was threatening the dominion of the mother-in-law, whose authority in the household kept her clothed and fed in a society that offered her no alternative. The mothers-in-law, feeling threatened with displacement, proved to be dedicated, relentless foes of the project, no matter the health benefits.

By the time the Ph.D.~student came to understand the dynamic, the funding had dried up, preventing her from trying in a different rural community where she could make the mothers-in-law the focal point of the plan.

3. Also in India, a well-known HCI scholar (from Berkeley?) devised a microfinance system around a series of paper forms with QR codes, a cell phone for each village, a tiny wooden platform for aiming the phone at the papers, a single printer serving many villages, and the Indian postal system to deliver the printed forms. This initiative brought together a small group of women in each village who would collectively save money and decide on small purchases. It took advantage of the presence of the postal system to overcome the issue of printing forms and used QR codes as an information storage and transmission system, enabled by the ubiquitous give-away phones running Symbian, an operating system too primitive to appeal to first-world consumers. The developer used the phone and wooden platform as an excuse to bring the group together to converse and make financial decisions, knowing that these meetings might have the potential to serve other purposes.

4. Finally, an Indian example I had the misfortune to witness was a CHI design competition where an Indian student had devised a hardware / software platform to assist bus conductors in a rural state. This was a small tablet-like device that would be carried by the conductor who would talk to the passengers to learn their destinations and enter them into the device, and be able to shout out stops to the driver at appropriate times. It was a complicated bottlenecky system. To show the audience that there were conductors on buses and that crowding on buses made it difficult to communicate stops, he showed many slides to illustrate. When someone asked why not let passengers communicate with their cell phones and remove the bottleneck, he explained that rural Indians were too poor to afford cell phones, a claim contradicted by dozens of the people pictured in his slides! He was also an example of a person who would not let his teammates speak, preferring to control the entire presentation and question-answer session. I have to think that he needed to acquire more sensitivity to the population he was trying to serve as well as to the colleagues with whom he was trying to do important work.

An observant student pointed out that Irani et al. (2010) describes a similar incident in rural India where HCI professionals tried to improve the lives of poverty-stricken people with water quality problems. When they could not find poverty-stricken people with water problems (!), they took their pre-existing solution to these problems elsewhere. Irani et al. (2010) tells a few such stories of postcolonial computing in this fascinating paper. Merritt and Bardzell (2011) offers theoretical support for thinking about HCI4D.

To summarize, communities of life can be served by HCI, but not without seeking some understanding of complicated fragile networks of infrastructure that account for so much of the variation in health between communities.

Disability-specific design

UT-Austin is notable as a disability-friendly campus, according to https://www.collegeconsensus.com/rankings/best-disability-friendly-colleges/

Although this introductory course does not introduce accessibility, you should be introduced to some of the terms and literature in this community.

Approaches to disability-specific design

Shinohara, Bennett, and Wobbrock (2016) identified four different approaches to disability-specific design and listed some of the research in each approach, which I will repeat here:

• universal design: Bigelow (2012), Mace, Hardie, and Place (1991)
• user-sensitive inclusive design: Alan F. Newell and Gregor (2000), A. F. Newell et al. (2011)
• design for user empowerment: Ladner (2015)
• ability-based design: Wobbrock et al. (2011)

Other design approaches of note

• value-sensitive design: Friedman (1996)
• design for social acceptance: Shinohara (2012)

You should investigate the above-listed resources to prepare for studies in accessibility and design.

Popularization via bad design

Norman (2013) popularized the identification of bad design in its first edition in the eighties.

Don Norman is the single person who has done the most to popularize HCI in the public consciousness. He is a brilliant thinker and I don’t mean to criticize him for this, but one thing he did that brought him amazing popularity yet did little to educate people was to popularize the discussion of poor design. His most popular book is fraught with examples of bad design and it is inevitable that any teacher of HCI can boost course evals by allowing students to waste a lot of time critiquing bad design. The problem with this is that it is so hard to get design right that noticing that much of it is poor is, by itself, a minute step.

Most bad design examples remind us of the importance of signifiers and the danger of cognitive dissonance.

• that aspect of a thing you can interact with that suggests how to interact with it
• can be done well or poorly
• central concept for individual user
• often skeuomorphic
• flat design opposes notion of need for signifiers

Flat design risks

dangers-of-flat-design

Bad door

Bad and less bad door

Anti-ADA door

Bad dryer

Bad iPad

Bad iPad’s ancestor

Bad elevators

Why are these elevator buttons bad? There could be a variety of problems. You might be excused for thinking the bottom button means down in the picture on the right. You might be mystified about the meaning of the button on the left. The problems are compounded if you’re blind. There is no braille and no shape indicator (of course, Braille itself is a problem in that only ten percent of blind individuals read it).

Hotel showers

One well-traveled pundit claims that this is what he sees whenever he looks at a hotel shower! I tend to agree and I have to admit I waste a lot of water in hotels trying to figure out how to get the right temperature!

References

Bigelow, Kimberly Edginton. 2012. “Designing for Success: Developing Engineers Who Consider Universal Design Principles.” Journal of Postsecondary Education and Disability 25 (3).

Dodson, Bert. 2006. Keys to Drawing with Imagination. Cincinnati, OH: North Light.

Friedman, Batya. 1996. “Value-Sensitive Design.” Interactions 3 (6): 16–23.

Irani, Lilly, Janet Vertesi, Paul Dourish, Kavita Philip, and Rebecca E. Grinter. 2010. “Postcolonial Computing: A Lens on Design and Development.” In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1311–20. CHI ’10. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/1753326.1753522.

Ladner, Richard E. 2015. “Design for User Empowerment.” Interactions 22 (2): 24–29. https://doi.org/10.1145/2723869.

Mace, Ronald L., Graeme J. Hardie, and Jaine P. Place. 1991. “Accessible Environments: Toward Universal Design.” In Design Interventions: Toward a More Humane Architecture, edited by W. E. Preiser, J. C. Vischer, and E. T. White. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold.

Merritt, Samantha, and Shaowen Bardzell. 2011. “Postcolonial Language and Culture Theory for HCI4D.” In CHI ’11 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1675–80. CHI EA ’11. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/1979742.1979827.

Newell, A. F., P. Gregor, M. Morgan, G. Pullin, and C. Macaulay. 2011. “User-Sensitive Inclusive Design.” Univers. Access Inf. Soc. 10 (3): 235–43. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10209-010-0203-y.

Newell, Alan F., and Peter Gregor. 2000. “"User Sensitive Inclusive Design"—in Search of a New Paradigm.” In Proceedings on the 2000 Conference on Universal Usability, 39–44. CUU ’00. New York, NY, USA: ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/355460.355470.

Norman, Donald A. 2013. The Design of Everyday Things, 2nd Edition. Basic Books.

Shinohara, Kristen. 2012. “A New Approach for the Design of Assistive Technologies: Design for Social Acceptance.” SIGACCESS Access. Comput., no. 102 (January): 45–48. https://doi.org/10.1145/2140446.2140456.

Shinohara, Kristen, Cynthia L. Bennett, and Jacob O. Wobbrock. 2016. “How Designing for People with and Without Disabilities Shapes Student Design Thinking.” In Proceedings of the 18th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility, 229–37. ASSETS ’16. New York, NY, USA: ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/2982142.2982158.

Weiser, Mark. 1991. “The Computer for the 21st Century.” Scientific American, 94–104.

Wobbrock, Jacob O., Shaun K. Kane, Krzysztof Z. Gajos, Susumu Harada, and Jon Froehlich. 2011. “Ability-Based Design: Concept, Principles and Examples.” ACM Trans. Access. Comput. 3 (3): 9:1–27. https://doi.org/10.1145/1952383.1952384.

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