Andrew Wirtanen is a usability specialist in Cary, NC More »

The Birth of HCI and Usability

There are a couple interesting articles in February’s Journal of Usability Studies. The editorial was written by Joe Dumas and he talks about the origins of the usability field. It’s a must read for anyone new to the profession that may not realize how it all began. Joe mentions the first Human Factors in Computer Systems conference in 1982, but points to the work of John Whiteside (at Digital) and John Bennett (at IBM) as the true point of inception for the field.

Joe raises an interesting point… In the mid 80s, the Macintosh was seen as the symbol of usable products. Today, the iPod has taken that role. Or has it? The iPod isn’t exactly easy to turn off unless you read the manual.

The other interesting article in the journal is entitled “Heuristic Evaluation Quality Score (HEQS): A Measure of Heuristic Evaluation Skills” and proposes a method to gauge expertise. The method counts the number of issues each evaluator identifies by heuristic and factors in the severity of the issue. It’s an interesting idea, which could become part of a certification program (which may arise in the future with the help of the BoK).

Hey, did you attend World Usability Day in your city?

I did here in Indianapolis…it turned out quite well….(maybe because one of my professors is the president of the Indiana chapter…i reckon he must have influences…)

I was unfortunately busy on World Usability Day… we had ours at the Museum of Science in Boston and things turned out pretty well from what I heard. I work with Chris Hass (Boston chapter president), so I heard a lot of stories and helped do some planning.

[...] Usability has come a long way since 1983 (the year I was born and the year this photo of Bill Gates was taken). The first Computer-Human Interaction (CHI) conference was held in 1982 and some of the major contributions to the field were published a decade later (e.g. Nielsen’s Usability Engineering and Dumas’s A Practical Guide to Usability Testing). For more on the beginning of usability, see an earlier post. [...]