Food for thought

A great site to visit to find examples of bad design (and where several of the examples from the slides developed to go with chapter 1 came from) is called 'Bad human factor design' It provides a wonderful scrapbook of illustrated examples of things that are hard to use because they do not follow interaction design principles. It is put together by Michael J. Darnell and has won various awards.

Take a look at any visionary video that Hewlett Packard has developed over the years. The latest is cooltown, available as an mpeg movie. It is a vision of the future based on HP research and is very thought-provoking.

Sound Bites

Tog's AskTog column and Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox provide regularly updated 'soundbites' on their websites, which are well archived. Have a look at Tog's first principles article, which provides an extensive set of design principles.

Useful HCI sites and portals

Over the years Gary Perlman has compiled a range of HCI resources and links, including definitions, recommended readings, articles on usability, an HCI glossary, and a list of most frequently cited authors.

The Human Factors International site has a number of interesting articles on usability (that sometimes go against common sense). Try out their interactive usability quiz and see how you fare.

The Human Computer Interaction Resource network (HCIRN) provides a range of useful things, including a job bank, personal reflections on interaction design and a large set of references.

HCI-index provides a range of pointers, including 'what's new in HCI' (and it's kept up-to-date)

Also from the UK, is the BCS HCI site, which provides a list of degree courses in HCI, and a good definition of HCI.

Let's not forget the US ACM CHI site.

Mikael Ericsson from Sweden developed a portal of HCI resources, including 'hot stuff', such as PhD theses. Sadly it hasn't been updated since 1998, but is still a good archive of material.

Rashmi Sinha has collected a page of links on the economic impact of usability, which is hard to determine but is an important issue in industry.

Glossary

Interaction design and its related disciplines, fields and approaches have many terms that are used to define the area. In our book, we provide careful definitions of the key terms that we use, and there is a detailed index to help you find the one that you are looking for. However, our on-line glossary is not yet available. Another source of definitions is Usability First's usability glossary. This glossary contains over 1000 items and covers many used in our book as well as others that you will come across when reading other material about interaction design. Some of the definitions given here may vary from the definitions we have used, but this is a characteristic of a relatively new area, and over time definitions will converge.