All of the following can be found in the Human
Computer Interactions section of the online proceedings.
Jakob Nielsen discussed the
SunWeb system, a set of Web pages used by
Sun internally to distribute
information about things like benefits, travel, internal libraries,
and so forth. The way they designed this (very quickly, testing a few
human subjects as they went along) is interesting, but the results are
very narrow.
Will Hill discussed how the idea of
community might be added to the Web. He cited how people tend to
walk over effective paths on, say a college campus, trampling the
grass in the process. While unsightly, this is an example of mass
descision-making in process: people assume that the most well-trodden
paths are also the best, and tend to tred on them more.
He suggested keeping track of how many people have followed a
particular link, and listing this along with the link. This could be
done on the server.
This raises the interesting question: is steering people to the data
they want more important than the data itself?
Paul Fontaine, a government type, presented some of the design
considerations that went into the design of the White House's WWW page.
(This should be up and announced soon. It may have something to do
with the US General Services
Administration .) Accessibility was one of the
major concerns. I thought this would be more Gore-driven ranting
about ``information haves and have-nots,'' but I was pleasantly
surprised.
The thesis is this:
In making systems accessible to, e.g., handicapped people, you end up
making them more accessible for everybody.
An example cited in one of the questions afterwards was curb cuts,
which were originally designed to allow people in wheelchairs to cross
streets more easily, but they also help parents with strollers, people on
bicycles, people on skateboards, people pushing stolen shopping carts,
etc.
He suggested making sure that text-only versions of pages were always
available (e.g., if you have a vis-map, make sure you have a simple
textual list). This is an obvious improvement, not all that
difficult, and also makes things more accessible to people connecting
to the Web, say, through a 14.4k-baud modem.
These sentiments were echoed in other sessions, for example, Greg
Vanderheiden's work in the
Evolving Interfaces session.