Human-Computer Interaction Books

I have met and attended many lectures by both Bens and believe they both have and still have many contributions to HCI. This book is not one of them, as I was suprised at the poor printing quality of this book. Many figures are unreadable, and make many references to the same project, (i.e. Spotfire)throughout many of the papers. The main reason for purchasing this book was to have one place to look for varied theories, methods or appliactions of information visualization. You may be better served by locating papers on this subject via the web and creating a collection of you own.

This book is extremely well produced and full of wonderful examples of what can befall designers who do not properly take international considerations seriously. It is worth consulting, but it does not provide much information on a culture-specific basis. It contains plenty of examples of what not to do, but few that show what to do. Overall I rank this over most other books on internationalization, but it falls short of the standard for real information that I would want. (The only text that really gives enough information in my opinion is Apple's guide on internationalization, which gives very specific information on what to avoid for specific locales.)

UI design has moved forward a lot since this book came out, but there's still material of value here. The suggestions about user-oriented language are still important, including the help your tech writer has to offer. Task analysis, although this predates commercial acceptance of OO, sounds a lot like the Agile world's "stories." And testing - it's just as important now as ever, especially for mission-critical interfaces, for mass-produced products where errors are costly, and for unfmailiar application areas (do you really know how a radiologist reads an Xray, for example?). Too bad most projects lack the schedule or budget for UI testing these days - but, thanks to books like this, good UI design is much more widely understood these days.

Still, after more than 20 years, so much has changed in the world that this book won't have the impact it did back in the day. Don't bother hunting this book down - but if you find it, thumb through it for its 100 or so aphoristic "guidelines." Many of them still apply, including:
- Verify that help helps. (Does the user really know what those words mean?)
- Coordinate all system responses. (Don't use a crazy quilt of mismatched terminology.)
- Avoid clutter. (Read Tufte if you don't know what this means - or even if you do.)

//wiredweird

Sloan covers a large range of topics here. Scarcely over a decade since the Web began, there is still considerable uncertainty about using the Internet for certain types of communication. Perhaps the greatest struggle has been over how to perform effective educational instructions via the Web.

Some of you will appreciate a little irony here. Sloane's publisher maintains several web pages for this book, so that readers can go to these and interact and hopefully learn more. However, if you try that, you will see that most of the material is very minimal. The page for "lecturer support material" has very little content. While the page for "Useful links" has none. All this compares unfavourably to other publishers who have invested far more effort in using the Web to support their books.

Unintentionally, the book reveals some of the confusion as to the best use of the Internet for teaching.

The first chapter is quite well-written. It presents a friendly introduction to types and typed lambda calculi and intuitively sketches the motive and results of the remaining chapters.

As for those, one might do well to read the first few pages of each chapter before sinking into the details. Motivation and definitions are generally presented up front, before descending into all the requisite formalisms and proofs (which are best left to professional programming language theorists).

The general thesis is that types provide a specification of software components, and isomorphisms are useful in constructing a tool to search through libraries of components. Di Cosmo does not, however, try very hard to convince the reader that types are ENOUGH of a specification of a function's behavior to be effective for retrieving useful modules from large, real-world software libraries.

Published at a time of waning euphoria about the dotcom boom, this hefty tome offers new perspectives on the importance of knowledge assets and intellectual capital for unleashing business model innovation.

The 25 chapters are drawn from 34 contributors in the U.S., Europe, Asia and Latin America; the compiled material is divided into four sections: KM frameworks, knowledge work, knowledge assets valuation, and organizational aspects of business model innovation. The writing styles are varied, and differing perspectives are offered at the cutting edge of the KM curve.

IT investments have not always been in lock-step with productivity increases, Malhotra rightly begins. For instance, ERP implementations led to an unprecedented level of information sharing across organisational functions - but straitjacketed the information flexibility of information processing for each of the locked-in functions.

And despite contributions of IT via phases like automation, streamlining of procedures, and process re-engineering, there has been little emphasis on business model innovation or rethinking the overall business, argues Malhotra.

Increasing empowerment of online customers, suppliers, partners and other intermediaries have led to a greater impact of external environments on internal logistics of a company, a trend well-exploited by Net pioneers like Amazon.com.

"It is not that traditional brick and mortar companies were not leading users of IT; however, the new Net-based companies have fundamentally redefined the value equations related to their internal value chains and supply chains," says Malhotra.

In such a hyperturbulent and discontinuous environment, he identifies shortcomings in much of the current KM thinking, whose simplistic assumptions may inadvertently make yesterday's archived best practices tomorrow's core rigidities.

"The new business model of the Information Age is marked by fundamental, not incremental, change," he argues. Current KM approaches haven't dealt adequately with the "creative abrasion and creative conflict" that are necessary for business model innovation today.

KM should embody the organisational processes that seek synergistic combination of data and information-processing capacity of information technologies on the one hand, and the creative and innovative capacity of human beings on the other, Malhotra advocates.

Management strategies need to shift from command and control - to sense and respond. KM processes should be focused on doing the right thing (effectiveness), not just doing the thing right (efficiency). KM is not merely about bottling water from rivers of data, but about giving people canoes and compasses to navigate in these rivers of data. Instead of just codified best practices and enterprise portals, the emphasis should be on unlearning ineffective best practices and the continuous refinement and pursuit of better practices.

Other KM framework writers in the book also agree with some of these positions. Dealing with complexity, equivocality, uncertainty, and ambiguity in today's environment can lead to information overload and collapse of sense-making in a company.

Tools like the knowledge matrix can be used for knowledge accounting and management in a company, especially for managing fuzzy boundaries between external entities where decisions about outsourcing and alliancing need to be made (particularly in the case of global operators).

KM practices can differ according to the nature of the organization: project-based (eg. construction industry), umbrella corporations (eg. GE), virtual business communities (eg. the Linux movement on the Internet), and the multi-directional network (eg. lobbies of SMEs in Taiwan).

In terms of new approaches to knowledge work, Malhotra advocates a movement away from hi-tech hidebound KM systems to one of more creative chaos, greater social interaction, playfulness in organisational choices, and strategic planning as anticipation of surprise.

Care should be taken to ensure that IT-driven KM strategy does not become mechanistic and objectify and calcify knowledge into static, inert information, thus disregarding the role of tacit knowledge.

A useful way of planning for increased information flows among mobile workers is via a two-dimensional grid for different/same time/place interactions, with tools like Intranet-based email, videoconferencing, and meetings. Challenges can arise in virtual organizations which allow tele-work, due to possibility of overwork, stress, and isolation among its knowledge workers.

New kinds of `knowledge toolboxes' are called for to effectively measure human capital and organisational culture elements like trust, and to actually use these measures. Stakeholder knowledge values lie at different levels: employee (self-actualisation), customer (product adoption capability), and top management (cohesiveness, motivation).

A very interesting chapter offers an example of assessing knowledge capital at the national economic level, while planning for growth and performance for the entire country.

Going beyond measures of GDP, a joint Swedish-Israeli study assessed Israel's intellectual assets in 1997 in terms of financial capital (productivity, exports), market capital (diffusion of new products, participation in international events, openness to different cultures, language skills), process capital (computerization and communications infrastructure, Internet usage, newspaper circulation, student-teacher ratio, innovation, top management international experience, entrepreneurship, VC funds, immigration), human capital (equal employment opportunities, percentage of book distribution, health rates), and renewal and development capital (civilian R&D expenditures, scientific publications, patents, startups).

Another chapter extends such valuation considerations to public-private partnerships, involving academia, industry and government, which are becoming increasingly necessary as no organization or country can on its own generate all the knowledge it may need.

Priorities, timelines, domains and financial expectations for each sector vary, and these in turn influence the nature of knowledge assets generated by a country and their monetary attachments, eg. financing of new research for the industry or for citizens at large.

At the KM tool level, researchers and entrepreneurs are racing to create the next generation of effective KM applications and infrastructure, including communication, storage, gathering, dissemination, and synthesis. Ernst&Young predicts that KM has the potential to exceed ERP as an application opportunity.

CKOs play a key role in organizations, in managing corporate knowledge capital and championing knowledge-centric cultures; they require a blend of technical, human and financial skills.

In sum, this is a comprehensive collection of case studies and analysis at the cutting edge of KM practice. The diverse range of material makes for an interesting and informative for advanced KM professionals.

On reading Downey's book, I was hard-pressed to tell exactly what kind of audience _The Machine In Me_ was aiming for. Too technical for most anthropologists and too loaded with anthropological jargon for most technology types, _The Machine In Me_ seems to fit only the narrow field of anthropological technology studies, thus depriving related audiences (general cultural anthropologists and techies) of its many interesting insights. Downey's examination of how a class of engineering students struggled, interacted, and in some ways became part of the CAD/CAM software with which they worked was fascinating. His success in communicating his sometimes complex observations about the social dynamics of technological fields and the nature of the students' relationships with the software, however, are obscured by unnecessarily complex and roundabout prose. Downey is left talking about "transcribing human agency into technology" without ever employing the clearly appropriate term "cyborg." In fact, Downey's book is unmistakably a work in the burgeoning field of cyborg anthropology, yet the book avoids all mention of the term. The end result, I think, is a book without a clearly defined audience, one that refuses to position itself inside a discipline and therefore is likely to be passed over by those who would benefit most from it.

Often people think of cyberspace in solely technological terms. This book attempts to look at the bigger picture of how it effects society. A good and thought provoking read. I would say that it is something that should be read to better understand the pervasive effect of what we call cyberspace today.

This book might be good for someone without health care or hospital experience, but after I looked through it and read its intended use, I realized that my 7 years of health care experience were probably much better than what the CDs could provide. I didn't even open the CDs.

It�s hard to predict the future, especially when it comes to technology. Consider the prognosticators of the early 20th century who forecast personal space travel, the end of disease, and other wonders; yet largely missed the invention of computers. Consequently, Clabby�s vision for the next generation internet should be read with equal doses of skepticism and optimism.

The premise is simple but intriguing: How will current technology trends shape the evolution of the internet? Clabby�s answer is the Sensory Virtual Internet. SVI is an environment where keyboard interface with computers has been replaced by voice recognition, coupled with the ability of users to receive both tactile and scent stimuli as well. SVI is driven by advances in these particular technologies, as well as infrastructure development � advances in graphics, solution of last-mile problems, and back-end systems.

The subtitle of the book is �Collaboration, communication, and commerce in the 21st century�. One of the main drawbacks of the book is that not enough attention is given to embellishing his vision of the SVI. Rather, the discussion of individual components � immersive video, body suits, and so on � is neither very original nor very detailed. So, while Clabby talks about revolutionizing e-learning or spatially dispersed teams, the discussion of how this will happen is very superficial.

Instead, Clabby spends much of his time describing how the core technologies needed for the SVI are advancing. As a result, much of the book is spent describing tech trends as they relate to AI, broadband penetration, network and server capabilities, and so on. I expect that Clabby�s purpose is to convince the reader that these technologies needed for the SVI are not pie-in-the-sky. Unfortunately, the book is short on facts and figures, and much of these trends have been better described elsewhere. Clabby also has a tendency to pull occasional material from company websites to illustrate these trends. I checked a number of these at random, and a significant number have disappeared (e.g., virtualcharacters.com or snortal.com). Start-ups come and go, but this book has just been published, and many of the exemplars of tomorrow�s technology are already defunct � not an encouraging sign.

Two other issues are a cause for concern. First, Clabby focuses almost entirely on computers as the conduit to the internet. There are projections that non-PC devices will soon outnumber PCs, as the success of Pocket PCs and other handheld devices continues to grow. I have internet access on my iPAQ, and new cell phones offer similar capabilities. Tablet computers also lurk in the near-term future. I was hoping that Clabby would have discussed the implications of these type of appliance for the SVI, and vice versa.

The second limitation is his US-centric focus. There are many developments outside North America which are salient to the future of the internet. As one example, consider China. At one extreme, metropolitan Hong Kong has a residential broadband penetration rate well above that of the US. Concurrently, mainland China has surpassed Europe as the #2 market worldwide for residential internet users. In contrast to Hong Kong, these users typically rely on much slower connectivity and older infrastructure. As the geographic scope of the web expands, so will the variance of hardware and software profiles. What are the implications of this for broad SVI adoption? Separately, internet cafes and kiosks are springing up in many Third World nations. The pool of potential users would change substantially if literacy and keyboarding skills were no longer needed to access the web. Again, however, this interesting question is not addressed.

So, how realistic is Clabby�s vision of the future? Ultimately, the question depends on the ability of these technologies to improve our lives. SVI could be the next big thing, or simply a passing fad � does anyone remember the Three Stooges episodes in 3D, or the movies that were shown using �Smell-O-Rama�?