Table of Contents
VOLUME XI.1 January + February 2004
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Editoral
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Scents and sensibility
Steven Pemberton
In his entertaining book From A to B and Back Again Andy Warhol claims that he never kept a diary, but instead wore a different perfume each day, for one day only. Whether it is true or not (and indeed whether there are even that many perfumes available) he…
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Research alert
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Reading patterns and usability in visualizations of electronic documents
Kasper Hornbaek, Erik Frøkjær
Reading electronic documents has become deeply integrated with the everyday activities of many people. Yet, reading electronic documents is complicated by a number of problems, including cumbersome navigation, lower tangibility of electronic documents compared to paper, unclear awareness of the length of documents, and lower reading speed caused by…
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What's happening
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What’s happening
Marisa Campbell
Symposium BHCIG Symposium on Usability and Interactive TelevisionEdinburgh January 22, 2004 Napier University Edinburgh, Scotland The British HCI Group in conjunction with the ScotlandIS Usability Forum will host a symposium aimed at exploring current and emerging trends in usability issues pertaining to interactive television (iTV). This will be of…
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Ten years of interactions
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Ten years of interactions
interactions Staff
January 1994. Ten years to the month since the introduction of the Macintosh, and the first issue of interactions was released. In 1994 you would still be using Windows 3.1, and Microsoft had recently successfully defended itself in the copyright case against Apple, a case which had divided the…
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Business
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To innovate or not to innovate…
Lyle Kantrovich
Usability practitioners love to preach about the merits of "standards and guidelines"; we seek out and destroy "inconsistency"; and a recent trend is to try to use "patterns" when designing products and user interfaces. If you were to ask someone in business to describe the usability field as a…
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Design
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Are agile methods good for design?
John Armitage
In a recent series of consulting projects, I served as the designer for a software development team working with agile development methods, widely known through the most severe of these methods, Extreme Programming, or XP. The most salient aspect of the agile methods movement [1] and of XP is…
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The whiteboard
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Digging in the wrong spot
Larry Marine
In Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones stands in the map room of the lost city, holding a staff that will aim a beacon at the location of the buried lost ark. Armed with a critical piece of information unavailable to his "competitor," he realizes he must shorten…
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HCI and the Web
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Foraging à la carte
William Hudson
Information foraging theory1 gives us a useful analogy for explaining user behavior when searching for information: Much as they might in a forest, users try to follow the scent of their prey. On the Web, this scent takes the form of visual clues, for the most part links displayed…
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Reflections
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Scratching someone else’s itch
Steven Pemberton
Different people have different psychologies. This seems almost too obvious to be true, but it is surprising how many people don't properly understand it. My favorite description of how peopleparticularly programmersdiffer is in chapter 15 of Bruce Tognazzini's book Tog on Interface: When Sensories drive to work, they are…
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Conferences
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CHI 2004
Marisa Campbell
The annual CHI conference is the leading international forum for the exchange of ideas and information about human-computer interaction (HCI). Diverse members of the global HCI community meet at the CHI conference to share the excitement of discovery and invention, to make and strengthen professional relationships and friendships, and…
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Fast forward
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The next revolution
Aaron Marcus
We're just a few years away from a revolutiona dramatic shift in technology similar in its implications to that of the introduction of personal computers on office desktops during the 1980s. Powerful computer hardware, software, networks, and wireless communication capabilities are being embedded in vehicles that transport people everywhere…
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Books
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Books
James Kalbach
Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do B.J. Fogg Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco, 2003 ISBN 1-55860-643-2 $34.95 Reviewed by James Kalbach In his new book, Persuasive Technology, B.J. Fogg has formalized a significant, emerging discipline. This discipline is captology, the study of how computers change…
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