Phil Gray

Literate Development: Weaving Human Context into Design Specifications

HCI approaches have distinguished themselves by their user focus, considering users’ needs, analysing their tasks, investigating their preferences and differences, and understanding physical, social, organisational and even technological facets of their environment. When much HCI writing was polemic, it was enough to stress the need for understanding the context of human usage and to describe some system failures brought about by incompatibilities with context. Almost everyone accepts the polemic now and it has been overlain by commercial lip service to participative, stakeholder-consulting, user-driven, activity-based validated system development. Much of HCI is seen as common sense, and it would appear that this sense is (at long last) becoming more common.

Temporal aspects of usability: papers from a workshop

Temporal properties of interaction were largely neglected in the first generation of interface design notations. GOMS, TAKD and production rules were all developed to identify operator tasks and analyse traces of interaction These approaches, typically, abstracted away from temporal issues. This reflected the contemporary focus upon interaction with stand-alone office systems, such as word-processors and spread-sheets. Similarly, early experimental work in HCI focused upon the impact of modes and errors on task completion times. It tended to ignore the changes in interaction that occur as users gain new skills through the prolonged use of complex systems.

Data Capture for Clinical Anaesthesia on a Pen-based PDA: Is It a Viable Alternative to Paper?

Mobile support for medical clinical decision-making and audit faces challenges related to the organisation of information and its presentation. In this paper we describe a document-oriented information design and associated adaptable user interface for pre-and post-operative assessment by anaesthetists. We present the findings of an empirical studycomparing the use by real anaesthetists of a prototype of our system with current paper-based techniques for pre-operative data entry tasks.

Ethics, Roles and Relationships in Interaction Design in Developing Regions

A workshop to explore ethical and organisational issues associated with interaction design efforts conducted in developing regions of the world. The workshop will discuss the challenges of conducting this type of work in a way that can bring sustainable benefits to people living in developing regions.

Supporting Error-Driven Design

This paper argues that two limitations restrict the utility of interface specification languages. Firstly, they provide no means of capturing the cognitive conditions that lead to operator ‘error’. This makes it difficult to distinguish between the normal behaviour of an expert and the mistakes that often lead to problems for novices. The second weakness is that interface notations cannot easily be used to represent and reason about asynchronous failures. This prevents designers from identifying solutions to failures that could occur at many different points during interaction. These are significant limitations because they reflect a pre-occupation with normative behaviour. Unless we have some means of analysing system failure and operator error then we will continue to have interfaces that are designed to support perfect users in perfect environments.