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In last month's HFI e-newsletter I
tried to illustrate how difficult it can be for practitioners to use the
Web to find current usability articles. In the article, researchers and
practitioners were asked to respond with where they published and how
they found up-to-date articles.
Researchers: The researchers who responded provided
no one place to publish that seems to be the most desirable. There was
no consensus on a favored place to publish so that practitioners would
be sure to read their study. Almost all responses included the proceedings
of the three major usability conferences in the United States (CHI,
HFES and UPA),
and four major journals including Human
Factors,
International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, Technical
Communication, and the Communications
of the ACM. Most of these articles are not readily available to practitioners
on the Web.
Practitioners: The practitioners who responded provided
additional interesting information. Over half indicated that the first
thing they do is an Internet search, usually with Google.
About one-third of the respondents accessed the archived newsletters at
humanfactors.com, useit.com
and uie.com. About 20%
stated that they used the ACM
Digital Library. Other sources of information that were frequently
mentioned included retrieving information from the four major organizations
(UPA, SIGCHI,
HFES and STC),
and the International
Journal of Human-Computer Interaction. Other sources included Wichita
State University's usability
newsletter, two daily digests (UTEST,
CHI-WEB),
and three Web sites (usability.gov,
hcibib.org and usableweb.com).
Based on this limited exercise, it is fairly clear that usability information
is being published in a variety of different locations. Most of it is
still paper-based, and most current, full articles are not readily available
on the Internet. This makes it very difficult for many (most) practitioners
to use this information in a timely way.
From a practitioner's perspective, I suspect that those articles that
can be found using a Google search will have much more impact on their
design decisions than those that are much more difficult to find and retrieve.
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