This post is part of the ongoing series of reading reflections on HCI papers and articles. You can find the other posts ‘here.’
Ben Schneiderman and Pattie Maes Direct Manipulation vs. Interface Agents interactions 1997.
Digital Object Identifier (DOI): https://doi.org/10.1145/267505.267514
Summary
The chosen articles record Ben and Pattie’s viewpoints on UI Design, with Ben very much in favor of Direct Manipulation, so much so that he envisioned a future where UIs are filled with buttons, sliders, and the like. At the same time, Pattie wants a future where a proactive interface agent can personalize the user interface.
Prompts
Why is this article important?
This article gives an insight into the early discussions and considerations in the HCI field. This article shows the beginnings of modern recommendation/search engines that rely on personalized and aggregated user data to suggest relevant information to the user proactively.
Ben’s views also reflect some of the reservations against interface agents, as they make the agent less predictable, similar to modern Deep Learning or black-box models, making understanding and working with the model a less consistent process.
What do the authors seem to be assuming about the future of A.I. and Human Interaction?
Both, Ben and Pattie, have a slightly overlapping view on the future of Human-Computer Interaction, with Ben wanting finer, granular control over the data through more sliders, buttons, and other filters, while Pattie wants the system to be similarly robust but behind an easier to digest UI that is personalized and tailored to the user, through a proactive agent, allowing a less experienced user to only interact with the elements he needs, while removing the clutter from the UI.
Pattie’s idea now dominates modern services like Netflix, Amazon, and other services that use recommendation engines, while Ben’s ideas appear more in structured environments like CAD software, where the user is expected to have a certain level of expertise.
How might you integrate the reading into your academic/professional work?
From this article, I learned about multiple ways to approach designing a UI and how the design of the UI can be influenced by the user’s expertise and the type of data being processed. I find it critical to consider to have the following factors in mind when designing UIs to ensure that the user can interact with the system in a way that is intuitive and easy to understand.
- Their expertise in the domain
- The nature of the domain
- The available mental workload of the user
With these factors in mind, I can design a UI that is intuitive and easy to use while also being robust and powerful enough to handle the data being processed.