The Usability of CHI

Starting in the 1980s a lot of usability professionals wrote about the challenges of introducing usability into commercial settings. They listed a number of different reasons (or better put, excuses)  they were given why a organisation and particularly software developers and their managers might be resistant to the human computer interaction approach.
Here are some commonly described objections/excuses not to improve the interface:

• It works just fine for me
• We can’t change now it because that would make us look bad that  we hadn’t changed it earlier
• I’d like to change it but we need to get everybody in the entire organisation who uses the product to agree and that’ll take so long it’s probably impossible so let’s not bother
• It’s just a matter of learning how to use the current system. I know it’s a bit challenging but you just have to make the effort
• The current way is very convenient for the people who develop the product and your proposal would make it more difficult for them just to benefit consumers. I don’t think that’s going to fly round here
• Look, we’re a monopoly supplier. Our customers just have to accept what we give them. We don’t have to make it more usable for them
• We’ve always done it this way
• We can’t change it now because then it would be inconsistent with all the older stuff that we’ve produced over the years
• The engineers in the organisation like it. They don’t really care about what customers think.
• Well that’s a really really strange idea – thinking about how people would actually use our product. We don’t really think that way here. We just think about how we can produce stuff most efficiently
• Your proposed ‘improvement’ will take up more space. We can’t be wasting precious resources just making it look nice
• Isn’t what you’re proposing just an issue of aesthetics; just making it look pretty? We are much more interested in the content not how it looks
• Oh, it’s all so subjective.  Just because you say you don’t like it doesn’t mean other people also won’t like it. We deal in cold hard facts and we can’t have any of this opinion nonsense getting in the way of our processes

I’m sure many of you recognise these kinds of objections especially from  people we  stereotype as cold hard engineers who have absolutely no empathy with the needs and struggles of the end-user – for whom of course as usability professionals we are the advocates.
Well, so far so good. Now for the Judo throw. I’ve just been doing some CHI reviewing. If you don’t know, CHI is the main conference for Human Computer Interaction researchers. Getting a paper into CHI is A Big Deal. Indeed in some ways it is more of a deal than getting a paper into a journal, because we’re all too busy nowadays writing things to bother reading what other people are doing.  I want to draw your attention to the usability of CHI itself (and by extension other ACM conferences). After all isn’t a research paper just as much an interface as a webpage or a computer application?

So, what about all these references? We use a very strange bibliographic convention in the ACM publications with  numbered references. It isn’t very consistent and bears only passing resemblance to other conventions. But today I’m not so much looking at the references listed at the end of the paper, but how we refer to those references inside the paper. Why on earth do we use numbers like [6] rather than author-date like (Fu & Pirolli 2007)? Are numbers really the best way to cite work when you’re writing a research paper?  Do numbered references improve the user experience of reading papers or do they rather get in the way when you’re reading a paper? Has anybody even asked this question?

There you are reading and you see a citation of [7]  Oh yes, you think, good old 7. that old chestnut. Yes of course she would be citing him to make her case wouldn’t she? Yes that totally changes your understanding of her argument. There she goes bringing 7 in to back up her mad idea, and worse she dares to try and  demolish [8]‘s claims which you rather liked. She’ll need to give you strong evidence that 8′s wrong after all these years.

No of course that’s not going to work is it? I’m sure you’ve experienced that flopping back and forth to the end of the paper to remind yourself what is 7 and what is 8 even when you’ve read both. Wouldn’t it be far better to follow the APA style convention of including name and date and in our references?
Wouldn’t that improve the user, the reader, experience significantly?

So what are we going to do about it? I wonder what would happen if we proposed this change to the ACM on the grounds of usability and the user/reader experience? I wonder if there would be a flurry of objections. I wonder what the objections would be. I wonder if they would look suspiciously like the list above… It would be a fun experiment wouldn’t it?

Now I have to be fair and balanced. After all, including the name and date all over the place just gobbles up extra space so it will be very inconvenient for the writers of a 10 page conference paper. And let’s be reasonable – maybe the number of authors of the paper actually outnumbers those who are ever actually going to read it carefully enough to pay attention to an argument based in part on citations.  So maybe optimising for the authors of the paper to cram more ideas into their 10 page limit is the right way to go. But somehow I have my doubts. I do hope it doesn’t apply to my own papers.

Finally, let me quote from an overview of APA style:

“The best scientific writing is spare and straightforward. It spotlights the ideas being presented, not the manner of presentation. Manuscript structure, word choice, punctuation, graphics, and references are all chosen to move the idea forward with a minimum of distraction and a maximum of precision.”

Found at http://apastyle.apa.org/about-apa-style.aspx

Doesn’t that sound like a really nice user centred design rationale for their bibliographic convention?

I’ve not been able to find the equivalent rationale for the ACM style. Do let me know if you find one.

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