The Skills We Need as HCI'ers

When I got full-time into HCI, it wasn't with the intention of writing code or picking site colors. I like the psychology and IA stuff a lot better, and even the worst CS students are far superior programmers compared to me. I'm attracted more to the social aspects of technology usage. Few of my HCI brethren seem to come from the web design end of the business. There are programmers, sure, but they tend to be more hard-core, writing software rather than web scripts. Yet, job descriptions for usability people are often hybrids of usability and true web design. Companies don't seem to care if we can do card sorts or usability tests. They want us to program.

Flash is a popular requirement, but there are even more likely items on the corporate wish list. .Net is a favorite, ASP.net , VB.net, or C#. Java has made good inroads, too. Javascript, of course. HTML is a given, but XML is coming up fast. It's tough to know if a company is looking for an HCI pro who can program a little, or a programmer who can recognize horrible usability when he sees it.

I have to admit that at one point between gigs I began looking again at ASP.net, on the advice of Ed Sullivan, a feisty and knowledgeable guy from IUPUI who assured me that an ASP.net programmer would always have a job. It still didn't trip my trigger, but the fact that I was diverting my attention in a direction I never wanted to go is indicative of the state of HCI at the moment. Are we non-programmer HCI'ers at a disadvantage, compared with the ASP.net crowd and New Media grads? Maybe. Depends on where you are in the country, maybe. But around here, I think for sure we're having more trouble justifying our existence.

Users Cannot Prognosticate

One of the favorite usability techniques by the uninformed is to sit a prospective user down in front of an almost-finished application and ask "So...how do you like it?"

This is wrong for at least two reasons. The first is the "New Coke Mistake". Older readers will recall that the Coca-Cola Company's New Coke was released in 1985. It was a sweeter, sprightlier formulation prompted by the enormous success of the Pepsi Challenge, a nationwide taste test that legitimately proved Pepsi to be a runaway favorite of test-sippers. But Coke made a huge mistake by equating sip-tests with long-term purchase and usage. Even hardened Coke drinkers didn't like the sweeter Pepsi, can after can. They wanted their old Coke. The taste tests had panicked the suits at Coke and led to a disaster of such proportions that the whole episode is still taught in marketing classes today.

The second reason is more subtle. It results from our human inability to anticipate. We like to think we're good at anticipating things. What else is a cerebrum for? But in study after study, we humans show a remarkable lack of prognostication skills. We can't correctly predict what we'll like or dislike later, what kind of gifts we'll want down the road, or what we actually do in a crisis. We do very poorly predicting how we'll respond to emotional events. Nor can we reliably predict how we'll like something later that we've just now seen. In actual fact, our conscious mind isn't all that conscious of things, either those things generated within the skull, or from the outside. Drunks aren't aware that they're impaired, for example. Cell phone users insist their reaction times are unaffected while driving, when research plainly shows that reaction is very much diminished, turning 20-somethings into senior citizens. Marketers have repeatedly found to their chagrin that products proposed to focus group members and enthusiastically embraced at the time often fail to catch on when they're actually sold.

That's not to say that focus groups or interviews are useless. They're not, but they're best used for eliciting information about the now, not in anticipating how they will be or feel later. It's almost never worthwhile asking participants to foretell the future.

My Cell Phone, My Death

I've been interested for some time in the hidden cognitive costs of talking on cell phones. I've found that almost nobody believes that their driving is impaired while chatting on a mobile, but the evidence is absolutely unshakable. It's been going on for years. I happened upon an article in Chance magazine from 1997, where the authors provided very strong statistical evidence that individual crashes were closely linked to cell phone use, but it took David Strayer and the University of Utah to actually measure reaction times and prove that cell phone use effectively turned 20-somethings into senior citizens while driving. It's purely a cognitive thing; using a hands-free set doesn't make any difference. Talking with a passenger doesn't have the same effect. Strayer's research shows that using a cell phone degrades change detection.

Of almost equal interest is the refusal of most people to believe the research. We're not conscious of much that happens within us, despite the belief that we are. I find that my usability class students are uniformly indignant at the suggestion that merely talking on a cell compromises their ability to drive. The attention blindness, however, it works, that envelops us during that time is not consciously evident to us. Hence, we remain oblivious to the danger.

The 1997 Chance article by Redelmeier and Tibshirani (cited by Strayer) detailed the meticulous analysis the authors did to conclude that individual car phone users were some four times more likely to crash compared to non-users during crashes. But they also examined why, if the chances soar so dramatically, that the overall accident rate hasn't also risen dramatically, which might by itself make cell users give up the devices while driving. They found that although cell phone use would indeed boost an individual's chances for an accident, the chance of an accident at all is so low that in the aggregate cell phone use doesn't raise the population's rate much at all. Cell phone calls are generally of short duration, which further reduces the overall effect.

What's REALLY Screwing Up Usability

After a considerable period of experience, I have come to the conclusion that most websites suck more because of lousy navigation than from bad controls placement, poor color choices, small text sizes, or anything else related to layout. I've found that users will forgive and use almost any interface mistakes, if only they can find what they're looking for. Poor navigation has left more users looking as confused as goats on Astroturf than any other single cause.

Now, it should be noted that this general rule applies more obviously to information-storage sites, not so much to interactive sites. But even if the emphasis is on interactivity, knowing where to go next in a sequence of steps is only a variant on where to go next to find materials.

It's for this reason that I wish HCI programs put more emphasis on information architecture. Many HCI'ers, even those with grad degrees, can't do card sorts or affinity exercises, nor perform cluster analysis. They have no clue about taxonomies, ontologies, or thesauri. I'm finding that the ability to organize whole site logically is both science and fine art, and deserves more class time than it's getting.

Life Poses Usability Problems

As if life didn't have enough usability problems, Second Life is apparently even worse. Over at Meta Versatility, there's a nice blog note about Second Life's usability difficulties. Linden Labs has engaged Adaptive Path to clean up the interface.