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This
one-day conference, organised by Design
Agenda, came about when Jakob Nielsen mentioned that some of
the leading lights in the HCI field would be in Europe for CHI 2000,
and he was interested in putting together a UK conference. The result
was a day of one hour talks from some of the most well-known faces
in the field-- Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini, Brenda Laurel, Ben Shneiderman,
Donald Norman, and Jakob Nielsen himself. There was also a two-stream
evening session with talks from a number of speakers from the likes
of Vodafone, IDEO, FT.com, Icon Medialab and Sapient, amongst others.
Unfortunately, I was unable to attend this session.
Despite
the far-reaching title, Design For Usability was a conference focused
largely on internet technology. Around 500 delegates attended, primarily
from the UK and Scandanavia. A straw poll during Tog's talk suggested
that only about half the delegates came from a usability background--
the other half presumably being marketeers and managers.
The
day started with an introduction from chairman Nico McDonald, and
a short video showing the sorts of usability problems we're all
familiar with-- people fumbling with VCRs and ATMs, and hidden camera
footage of people trying to use information kiosks. The accompanying
soundtrack was a recording of a phonecall to a mobile phone company's
automated customer support line. The video was apparently thrown
together at a few days' notice, and I felt it showed... I'd rather
they'd skipped it and spent the extra 10 minutes on the question
and answer session at the end of the day, especially as it transpired
that all the speakers had to leave early due to a mix-up with their
flight bookings!
Jakob
Nielsen
First
up was Jakob Nielsen, whose
theme was "if the customer can't find it, the user can't buy it".
He used his hour primarily to summarise the results of his latest
web usability study, in which a number of American and Danish subjects
were asked to perform a number of specific and open-ended tasks
using various commercial websites-- some belonging to big household
names (such as Disney and Wal-Mart), others to small concerns (such
as norwaysweaters.com).
The results were unsurprising to those of us from the usability
world, but doubtless opened a few mangerial and marketing eyes,
with only 69% of the US users completing their tasks on e-commerce
sites successfully, and only 46% of the Danish users. Jakob described
how lost sales were primarily attributed to items being hard to
find, poor item descriptions, lack of information about shipping
costs, and difficulties with the now-ubiquitous shopping cart metaphor.
The difference between the two nationalities was attributed solely
to language difficulties, which magnified the same problems that
the US users experienced.
Bruce
Tognazzini
Next
up was Bruce Tognazzini, who
focused on "functionality and productivity on the web". He described
the three different views of any software system : the design model,
the system image and the user model, and went on to talk about the
approaches you can take if (or when!) usability testing indicates
that the three don't match up. The main thrust of this was a presentation
of "Maximising Windows", one of the most
popular articles from his website. This describes the apparently
simple problem of asking the user to maximise a browser window to
fill their screen (in the days before Netscape supported this task
programmatically-- which came along the week after he solved the
problem!) Tog is certainly an entertaining speaker, but I was already
very familiar with the example he was describing-- although I seemed
to be in a minority there, given the reaction when Parker the Prairie
Dog made his entrance!
Brenda
Laurel
After
a rather crowded lunchbreak, Brenda
Laurel talked about "experience-based web Design". This was
probably the most interesting section for me, as although I was
vaguely aware of Brenda's "Purple
Moon" project, I'd never really acquainted myself with the details.
Brenda used this research as the basis of most of her talk, explaining
how she went about studying ethnographic differences between male
and female American teenagers to help establish what would make
succesful computer games and websites for girls. Although an hour
wasn't nearly enough to tell us everything Brenda obviously wanted
to share with us, she described a number of techniques she'd found
to be successful, ranging from self-documentation and observation-based
improvisation, through to watching movies with your kids that you
would otherwise avoid like the plague!
After
a nervous start, Brenda definitely shone, and was probably the only
speaker on the day to prompt me to read a bit more about the ideas
she was presenting.
Ben
Schneiderman
Ben
Shneiderman's theme was "the future of web interfaces". After throwing
bits of a dismantled keyboard into the audience, and a brief flirtation
with how web usability metrics might change in the future, this
turned out to be mostly about visualization techniques for presenting
the large amount of information available on the web in a managable
fashion. Starting with an explanation of why broad and shallow information
hierarchies work better on the web than narrow and deep ones, Ben
moved onto more complex visualization techniques, inevitably focusing
on the commercial Spotfire product
which was developed from his research in this field. When questioned,
however, he was unable to suggest how such a complex product might
transfer into a fast, simple web-based interface without compromising
its usefulness.
Don
Norman
Don
Norman rounded up the afternoon's talks with "Information appliances
and the non-web Web", a theme familiar to anybody who read his last
book, "The Invisible Computer". Information appliances are small,
cheap, consumer devices that replace the single, large, complex
device we currently rely on for internet-based services: the PC.
Examples Norman cited included portable MP3 players, PDAs, email-capable
wristwatches, internet radios, and picture frames with LCD screens
that can download new pictures on demand. As he pointed out, the
main problem with such devices at the moment is achieving the "cheap"
part-- in focus groups for the picture frame, for example, he found
that people were only willing to pay $50 or so for a product that
currently costs around $300 to manufacture. Again, this was an interesting
talk for anyone unfamiliar with Norman's work, but contained little
that can't be found in his back catalogue.
Open
Floor
Finally,
the floor was thrown open to questions, a session unfortunately
curtailed by the participants having to leave earlier than planned
to catch their flights. (In fact, Tog was absent, having already
left for his!) As a result, there was only time for three or four
questions. Of these, the ones that provoked the most discussion
were how web browsers might do more for the user in the future (e.g.
retrieving customer satisfaction information about companies from
some third-party source, and superimposing it automatically over
their banner ads on web pages), and whether or not user interface
features should be patentable (of which Ben was in favour, and Brenda
decidedly against!)
All
in all it was a worthwhile day out for me, although I was familiar
with much of the material already. It was my first opportunity to
see any of these guys perform live, and put faces to all the names
on my bookshelf. And if nothing else, I can say I've had lunch with
Tog and stood next to Don Norman in the queue for the bathroom!
Official
reports and photographs from the day, as well as a discussion and
resources area, are to be published soon on the official conference
website
Calum
Benson is Mananger, User Interface Design with PTC
in South West England.
The
Design for Usability Conference took place on April 3rd, 2000 at
Shaw Park Plaza, London, England.
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