Elizabeth A. Buie

User interface guidelines and standards: progress, issues, and prospects

Abstract This article reviews progress in the development of standards and guidelines for human–computer interaction, including those developed within international and US standards bodies. Guidance for incorporating software ergonomics standards and guidelines into software design and development processes is discussed. Several different techniques that have been defined for assessing the conformance of a product to guidelines are reviewed. In addition, the strategies employed by formally approved standards developed in ISO and ANSI for determining conformance are discussed. Finally, we discuss the prospects and challenges for software ergonomics standards and guidelines that must be addressed as the pace of technological change continues to accelerate.

HCI challenges in government contracting

Organizers: Elizabeth Buie, Computer Sciences Corporation, USA tel: +1.301.497.2524; email: ebuie@csc.com Ira Winkler, Science Applications International Corporation, USA tel: +1.410.266.0993; email: winkler@c3i.saic. com Government: Christopher Nor/off, Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Div., USA Michael Shafio, NASA Ames Research Center, USA Nigel Bevan, National Physical Laboratory, UK Contractor: Andrew Cohen, McDonnell Douglas Aerospace West, USA Bonnie Hawkins, Computer Sciences Corporation, LJSA consultant: Deborah Hix, Virginia Tech, USA

HCI challenges in government contracting: a CHI '95 workshop

Human-computer interaction specialists fkom government, indust,?~ and academia met at a CHIP5 workshop to j~rmulate a strategy j~r addressing the unique challenges that HCI developmentAGces in government contracting environments around the worM. Continuing the work that began at a CHIP4 SIG, workshop participants rqqned the problem definition, devised some approaches to solving it, and identified opportunities fbr the involvement of the HCI community all aimed at establishing HCI as an integral part of government systems development processes. They produced a poster to summarize their resultsJ~r the CHI95 confbrence.

What's in a word?: The semantics of usability

When you say something is intuitive, do you mean that absolutely everybody understands it right away? If you say a program is logical, what help is that to a user? Does user-friendly mean anything these days? (Did it ever?)

HCI challenges in government contracting: a CHI '94 SIG report

Governments spend huge resources on custom computer systems, developed by contractors to government specifications under government monitoring. HCI development faces challenges from this environments constraints and the HCI communitys virtual neglect.

The whiteboard

W We start the new year1 with a new interactions column. Steven Pemberton (the esteemed editor of this magazine) has long envisioned having a column aimed at designers and practitioners and a forum for exploring design features and analyzing their usability issues. After a long e-mail discussion in which he and I disagreed on the relative merits of two Web sites for train scheduling, Steven invited me to edit the column. We batted around some ideas and settled on a few basic principles:

The whiteboard: a tale of two Websites

Politics as Usual: The Race of the Websites Republicans and Democrats routinely hold marketingstyle focus groups, but I’ll bet that neither of their website design firms consulted either voters or usability professionals before launching the August 2000 versions of the U.S. presidential candidate websites. In a usability review of these sites, I found common flaws as well as notable differences. The Al Gore site (www.algore.com) and the George W. Bush site (www.georgewbush.com) share an important defect: Visited and nonvisited links are the same color, so the sites fail to give visitors feedback on what they have and have not already seen. Maybe the designers think voters won’t be visiting often enough to need this information? Other common problems included browser incompatibilities, lack of accessibility to people with disabilities, and a nonfunctioning Back button. Both sites suffer from vanity bloat, ambiguous links, and a paucity of locally oriented information.

HCI challenges in government contracting (abstract)

Governments spend huge resources on custom computer systems, developed by contractors to government specifications under government monitoring. Although a number of these systems involve defined usability efforts, a majority of the development efforts have little requirement for system usability. For these systems, usability generally relies on the awareness, skills, and perseverance of the developers. HCI practitioners face an exceptionally daunting task in government environments, because funding allocations for the various development activities are clearly defined very early in the development process. A relatively poor understanding of usability issues by most development and acquisition managers usually gives the HCI effort short shrift. Government HCI practitioners met at a Special Interest Group (SIG) Session at CHI ’94 to discuss the challenges they face in their work assignments and to explore potential approaches to the challenges.

Usability engineering 2: measurement and methods

This report summarizes the activities of the Usability Engineering 2: Measurement and Methods (UE2) Symposium held March 3, 1997 at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg, Maryland, USA. The workshop was co-sponsored by NISTs Information Technology Laboratory (ITL) and by the HumanComputer Interaction Laboratory (HCIL) of the University of Maryland. Over 145 people attended a comprehensive technical program that included parallel tracks for managers, experts and novices.