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From: www.itworld.com
Experts: Computers slouching toward usability
April 18, 2001 —
Just a week before Microsoft Corp. clipped Clippy, the supposedly helpful assistant for its Office suite, more than 3,000 designers, engineers and researchers descended on Seattle to talk about the very thing that helped put Clippy out of a job: making computers easier to use.
The 18th annual Computer/Human Interface (CHI) conference last week was ground zero for discussing how computers and humans interact today and how they should work together in the future.
And conference speakers agreed on at least one thing: There's still a lot of interface work to be done.
"The old concept of computing is, 'What computers can do.' The new concept of computing is, 'What people can do,'" said Ben Shneiderman, a computer science professor at the University of Maryland in College Park and recipient of the second-ever CHI Achievement Award. Shneiderman invented Hyperties, the first system in which highlighted text could be linked to other written material. The 1983 system preceded the hyperlinks used to link Web pages today.
Speakers at the six-day conference, including Shneiderman, said software and hardware aren't nearly as usable as they should be. And the presenters said so at times in very blunt language.
"It's time to get angry about the quality of user interface design," Shneiderman said.
"The devices we're forced to endure are crappy," said Donald Norman, president of Unext.com in Deerfield, Ill., and author of The Design of Everyday Things (Doubleday, 1988). "Most human error is caused by design error."
Among those at the conference was Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates, who made the opening speech this year. Microsoft is held in questionable regard by many usability experts, although Gates' speech focused on what he thinks computers -- or Microsoft -- could do for people.
"I think it's fair to say that Microsoft has done good things in computer/human interface and also done its fair share of bad things as well," he said, pointing to Clippy. Microsoft this week announced that its paper clip character had outlived its usefulness.
Asked about the usability of Microsoft products, CHI participants offered lukewarm comments about Gates' company.
"It's way too cliched to say Microsoft stuff doesn't work, [but] it's good that they show interest" in usability, said Deirdre Bonini, a graduate student and psychology researcher at the University of Dublin's Trinity College in Ireland.
"I think they try," said Jesse Itzkowitz, a graduate student at the Gainesville, Fla.-based University of Florida who questioned Gates' assertion that only 55% of Office users deleted Clippy from their computers. Despite that interface faux pas, he noted that Microsoft still stacks up well against other software makers.
"You look at Linux. Its use is increasing, but the interface is just so awful," Itzkowitz said.
Pointing to a different direction for user interface, Hesham Kamel, a University of California, Berkeley, graduate student who is blind demonstrated a drawing tool for those without sight.
"The trend of technnology for others has been getting smaller and lighter, but not for blind people," said Kamel. His elegant software-only approach is to divide the computer screen into a three-by-three grid, much like a telephone keypad, with each grid corresponding to a keypad numeral. Each of those nine sections contains another three-by-three grid, and each of those sections has yet another. Using voice-recognition software, a user can tell a computer which grids to connect and how.
Kamel said he hopes the software will one day be applied to applications such as Microsoft's PowerPoint. "It's almost impossible for blind people to use PowerPoint without sighted assistance," he said.
Gregg Vanderheiden, founder and director of the Trace Research & Development Center at the University of Wisconsin -- Madison and a pioneer in augmentative and assistive technology, echoed that sentiment.
"The same kinds of things that make products accessible [to the disabled] make for better products," he said. He listed several inventions for "disabled" people that quickly entered mainstream life: carbon paper, typewriters, hot tubs, TV captions, access ramps and even curb cuts on sidewalks.
If more products had been designed with disabilities in mind, they could have netted even more money, Vanderheiden said, and innovations like vibrating pagers could have reached the market much sooner.
Computerworld