Shneiderman: Designing for a Minority is Good for the Majority
Usability forefather Ben Shneiderman was the keynote speaker at Aging by Design 2006 at Bentley College this week. His overall message was that by making things universally accessible and usable for a sub-population (such as seniors), we are helping everyone. He cited examples such as closed captioning, which is used by not just deaf people, but also people trying to learn a different language.
Dr. Shneiderman reviewed work from his Human-Computer Interaction Lab (HCiL) at the University of Maryland. He talked about the Photomesa image browser and also the technique of treemapping. Treemapping is a way of visualization information in a constrained environment. An example of treemapping is the Hive Group’s iTunes Top 100 song visualization.
Challenges of universal usability, according to Shneiderman, include accommodating technology variety and user diversity. Also, we need to bridge the gap between what users know and what they want to know. To help makes site more universally usable, Dr. Shneiderman suggested using show-me’s, in particular 10-60 second narrated Flash recordings. He mentioned that there about 50 show-me’s in Windows Vista. He also suggested the technique of using a multilayer interface to appeal to different types of users and/or ease them in to a software product.
The night before the conference, Dr. Shneiderman spoke to 35 members of the Bentley CIS and HFID community. An important message he delivered to us is that the usability profession needs to step up to the plate. He said that the space program and physicists had their chance in the spotlight, and now it is ours. He came up with a few ways we could do this, with the most interesting being a network of people to help out in times of emergency (such as a hurricane). He also urged us to blog about usability problems we encounter, because then our concerns may be heard by the masses (and eventually the organization that made the system we are complaining about).
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