UI Design Newsletter – September, 2002

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.

It's amazing how little of the good usability research is really used. Ask developers where they go to get help with design decisions. Many will go to public Web sites and commercial applications. They copy the interface conventions they find. Unfortunately that DNA is often profoundly flawed. They also depend on the opinions of colleagues, executives, and friends. Yet we know that such people are wrong about interface decisions about 30% of the time. It seems worthwhile to get the benefit of the real research. It is so much better then guessing.

As our industry matures we must develop better conduits to disseminate our research findings. Professional organizations need to provide Web-enabled repositories. Companies like HFI will put the research into manageable courses and products. As practitioners we must allocate time to absorb and incorporate the latest results.