For the last two / three years I’ve been increasingly vocal – and annoyed – at the lack of human factors and user interface work at WWW. I’m glad to say that in 2012 things seem to have changed – lets hope for continued change into 2013 and beyond.
While consensus does not automatically imply correctness, it’s a fair bet that gathering a group of twenty accessibility experts in the same room and asking them what they want to see funded by the EU in the coming years, may very well produce an important research agenda for the future.
WWW 2011, Hyderabad, India.
As you probably already know, this years slightly confusing (thinking of the Web4All co-located conference) www theme was, yes you’ve guessed it ‘Web For All’:
The Web has had a glorious existence of over two decades and has revolutionized the way we work and live. It has been the catalyst for proliferating information across boundaries, enabling effective communication and 24/7 service availability all leading to a digital, information based economy that we have today. Yet, its direct influence has reached a small percentage of human population. By virtue of being hosted in a growing developing country, bubbling with innovation, this year’s theme aims to highlight the need for expanding the horizons of the Web to become all inclusive and pervasive, reaching out to every human life.
So you will understand my anticipation of a web conference specifically themed with a focus to users. Now it seems to me the organisation did a good job of promoting this inclusive theme across most of the unread or read paper tracks there was yet again no work in the human factors/ web ergonomics domain. As I decried in last year’s trip report from WWW 2010 interaction is dead at the Web conference and this view was yet again supported by the offerings at WWW 2011. It’s easy to be critical so instead let’s discuss the solution.
What is the problem? I think that it is mainly the error of spreading topics across existing tracks and seems to be why we have no human factors work in this years or last years conferences. Everything in one track means ‘like is reviewed with like’; spreading them through tracks means that like is not reviewed with like and probably with less expert reviewers. Indeed, the Human Factors community is notoriously hard when reviewing it’s own work – with a tenancy to `eat its own young’ so mid scoring HF papers will not compare well with more leniently reviewed papers from other domains. I think this means we need a ‘Web Ergonomics’ track which would bring together all the Human Factors work happening on the Web under a broad science and engineering umbrella and would cover:
In general anything at the intersection of Human Factors and the Web. I see this as an all encompassing Human Factors on the Web track – so everything from ‘simple’ User Agent research to understanding emergent human behaviour on the Web. So we would see it more like WWW+CHI+UIST+UX. The problem with HF is that there are few strong HF/Web research groups explicitly and most work seems to be distributed across research groups who are focused on other things.
The problem is that most groups see CHI as the premier conference, and more likely to accept their work because of the very low HF acceptance at previous Web Conferences – indeed their submission deadline is before the WWW’s and their notification is normally after the WWW submission deadline has closed. Social Sciences and Anthropology do not really submit to WWW as it is more expensive as a conference than they are used too – hence the WebSci conference (and even then when the fees increased after the first conference they lost these submissions). The good news is that this just leaves technical submissions from CS/HF groups looking at the Web – if you like – people who do this work as a primary focus and not as an offshot of other work – making a defacto cohesive community; which (our lab) have called Web Ergonomics to try and foster an inclusive but technically strong community of people focused on this area as their primary research domain.
Just as a point of clarification (because people have told me ergonomics is sociology!) ergonomics isn’t a social science subject – it just means human factors – indeed it is really applied science / engineering and well known as ergonomics in mechanical, civil, aerospace engineering and the like – and is all about understanding technology and conforming it to people:
An ergonomist is an individual whose knowledge and skills concern the analysis of human-system interaction and the design of the system in order to optimize human well-being and overall system performance.
Looking from a Tuk-Tuk en Route to Downtown Hyderabad
This years W4A was yet again a triumph, especially Bebo White’s ‘Geezer’ – doing William proud for this second Memorial Address!
Now, normally I pick out a few technical papers which I think pretty good, however, departing from convention I decided to summarise each paper, both technical and communication, in as near to 140 characters or two sentences as possible. In this way I hope that anyone interested will be able to quickly understand the gist of the paper and use this understanding to decide if they want to read further.
So these are my one line summaries for each of the papers, based on my notes and not solely on the views of the authors, the presentations, or the papers.
