Some Online References

Contents of this page:
General User Interface Information
Usability information
Ethnography and Field Studies
International and Global design
The Digital Divide
Accessibility and "universal usability" of the Web

General User Interface Information

Task-Centered User Interface Design: A Practical Introduction
http://hcibib.org/tcuid
Also available in HTML version at: http://hcibib.org/tcuid/
A superb shareware book written by Clayton Lewis and John Reiman. It is short, pragmatic, gives lots of good examples and leads the reader through the interface development process from start to finish. Although the book was published in 1993, the humans we design for haven't changed much during the interim. A great place to start.

Delta - a method for constructing computer systems on the basis of users' needs
http://www.deltamethod.net/1Introduction_index.htm
Another good reference on the process of user-centered design, the Delta method was developed by Ericsson Infocom Consultants AB and Linköping University. It includes a high level methodology for developing systems in a user-centered way. There is a downloadable PDF available of the entire text at the site, as well as a search engine to allow you to pinpoint specific information.

The HCI bibliography project
http://www.hcibib.org/
The Human-Computer Interaction bibliography project -- the searchable "first source" for abstracts of just about everything ever written in the field of Human Factors in UI design. Gary Perlman, the founder and maintainer has done a stellar job of pulling together resources.

Gary Perlman's Suggested Readings in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), User Interface (UI) Development, & Human Factors (HF)
http://www.hcibib.org/readings.html
Gary's excellent annotated and searchable collection of recommended books for user interface developers, this is a subset of the HCI Bibliograhy listed above. It has links to Amazon.com should you wish to order these books. This will result in a royalty that will be donated entirely to BuckCHI, the Central Ohio ACM SIGCHI Chapter. If you are going to buy the books anyway, it might as well benefit a good cause.

The HCI index
http://is.twi.tudelft.nl/hci/
Maintained by Hans deGraff at Technical University of Delft in the Netherlands, this is a great site with many links, including many international ones.

Linkoping UI Links
http://www.ida.liu.se/labs/aslab/groups/um/hci/
Another great site of links maintained by Mikael Ericsson of Linkoping University in Sweden, also strong on international links.

ACM SIGCHI
http://www.sigchi.org
Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group in Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI) is the premier international professional organization in Human-computer interaction. This site has many interesting links, including to conferences and other resources.

Human Factors and Ergonomics Society
http://hfes.org/
The oldest professional organization in a broad of Human Factors - including user interface design and usability. Links to a wide-range of information on many topics.

Usability Professionals Association
http://www.upassoc.org/
UPA is a practitioner-oriented organization dedicated to enhancing the skills and professional success of usability professionals created in 1991. Most of the site is organization-focused.

Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility
http://www.cpsr.org/
CPSR members work to direct public attention to critical choices concerning the applications of information technology and how those choices affect society

Back to the Top


Usability

Usability.gov
http://usability.gov/index.html
Basics about Usability, and links to other sites with more information. A good place to start for an overview and a sense of the field.

Usable Web
http://usableweb.com/
A great place to start for Web (mostly) and non-web usability and user interface information and many great links to other resources on the Web. Updated regularly by Keith Instone.

Usability Methods Toolbox
http://jthom.best.vwh.net/usability/usable.htm
James Hom compiled this great set of information for his Masters project. It is somewhat outdated (from 1998), but gives a good set of links. Definitely worth the stop.

Testing tools and methods from the University of Maryland Guide to Usability for Software Engineers (GUSE)
http://www.otal.umd.edu/guse/testing.html
Put together by Masters level students, this page gives a good set of starter links to a variety of tools and methods for doing usability testing. It is somewhat dated (from 1998) but the more conceptual things are still helpful.

Web site Analysis and MeasureMent Inventory (WAMMI)
http://www.wammi.com/
WAMMI is a particularly good, user-centered evaluation tool for web sites. It is based on a questionnaire that your visitors fill out, and which gives you a measure of how easy to use they think your web site is. The questionnaire has been developed based on research, and has an international database of results from a large number of web sites.

http://www.gargaro.com/test.html
An interesting case study by Carolyn Gargaro reporting on testing to compare Netscape Navigator with Microsoft Internet Explorer. In addition to giving an idea of how she did the evaluation, this site also provides an idea of how usability can be done to compare competing products.

Back to the Top

Ethnography and Field Studies

Anthropology Resources on the Web
http://home.worldnet.fr/~clist/Anthro/index.html
Originally compiled by Alan Lutins, and now maintained by Bernard-Olivier Clist. Exhaustive links to sites, USENET groups, listservs, and other resources available online. The best place to start for an introduction to traditional ethnographic information, with a decidedly anthropological flavor.

CSAC Ethnographics Gallery
http://lucy.ukc.ac.uk/
Maintained by the Centre for Social Anthropology and Computing -- University of Kent, this site contains information on research at CSAC, reference resources of special use to anthropologists, and a range of resources useful in the teaching and learning of anthropology. CSAC has undertaken three Internet-based ethnographic projects. Lots of great links.

WWW Virtual Library for Anthropology
http://vlib.anthrotech.com/
Lots of links, mostly to "pure" anthropology sites.

ANTHAP
http://www.oakland.edu/~dow/anthap.htm
The Applied Anthropology Computer Network

Ethnographics Laboratory
http://www.usc.edu/dept/elab/welcome/
A teaching, research and archival facility for new media at USC. More "pure" anthropology, but interesting.

The Anthropology Review Database
http://wings.buffalo.edu/anthropology/ARD/
A site for doing searches on specific topics in anthropology.

Hypertext Organization of Ethnographic Data
http://www.umanitoba.ca/anthropology/kintitle.html
A tutorial which the author (Brian Schimmer) suggests that Hypertext organization of ethnographic data promises to be a major enhancement of emerging computer assisted modes of analysis and explication for qualitative data because of its capacity to substitute multilayered and multistranded sequencing for linear text presentation introduces advantages on descriptive, instructional, and theoretical levels. He uses Kinship data as the content he uses to demonstrate this, but the concepts are applicable to other types of date sets, such as those from user experience ethnographies. Be sure to check out the Introduction where he explains it all.

Cyber-Sociology
http://www.socio.demon.co.uk/home.html
Site with information and links to other sources on "electronic ethnographies" and observation of online behavior. Some interesting information on computer-mediated communication (CMC) including MUDs (multi-user dungeons), including online and annotated bibliography

Cybersociology
http://www.cybersociology.com/
Cybersociology Magazine is a forum for the discussion of the social scientific study of cyberspace. Every few months, this e-zine will strive to publish at least three original articles dealing with cyberspace, the Internet, and online communities. Each issue will also contain book and site reviews.

Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies
http://www.com.washington.edu/rccs/
Cyberculture is a collection of cultures and cultural products that exist on and/or are made possible by the Internet, along with the stories told about these cultures and cultural products." A tangential site that gives more of a grounding in the basis for CMC, etc. Good annotated bibliography

Anthropologists Go Native in the Corporate Village
http://www.fastcompany.com/online/05/anthro.html
A classic story from the magazine Fast Company describing early 'corporate ethnography" efforts.

Back to the Top

International and Global design

IWIPS, International Workshop on Internationalisation of Products and Systems is one of the major gatherings in this topic area. There is no current organizational website, only sites for each of the previous conferences:
2002 (http://www.iwips2002.org/) held in Austin, Texas, USA
2001 (http://brains.open.ac.uk/cfdocs/iwips/) held in Milton Keynes, England, UK
2000 (http://zing.ncsl.nist.gov/iwips2000/) held in Baltimore, Maryland, USA
The first conference site is no longer available.

Intercultural resources from Gary Perlman
http://www.hcibib.org/intercultural/

Building Worldwide websites
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/web-localization.html
Language issues, specifically, translation vs. localization, discussed in detail.

Localization Industry Standard Association
http://www.lisa.org/
LISA is an organization for the Globalization, Internationalization, and Localization business communities. LISA holds conferences, training and workshops, and provides information on these topics at their site.

CHI-SA: Computer-Human Interaction in South Africa
http://www.chi-sa.org.za/
Includes links to the proceedings from the CHI-SA conferences that have many papers on multi-cultural design and use.

Cross-Cultural Communication course
http://www.culture-at-work.com/overhead.html
Overheads and notes from a course taught by Dr. J. E. Beer of the School of International Service, American University, Washington, D.C.

Intercultural Communication Homepage
http://www2.soc.hawaii.edu/css/dept/com/resources/Intercultural/Intercultural.html
Néstor G. Trillo's graduate school research in intercultural communication at the University of Hawaii. This is a good resource even though some of the links in the web directory are broken.

CIA World Factbook
http://www.odci.gov/cia/publications/factbook/indexgeo.html
This is truly one of the best sources of international information on the Web today. Each country of the world is listed along with pertinent details, including languages spoken, population, telephone use and even how many ISPs are active in the nation.

InterculturalRelations.com
http://www.interculturalrelations.com/
InterculturalRelations.com is a free online interdisciplinary resource designed for so-called "interculturalists" around the world to help facilitate communication among the disciplines of intercultural relations (cultural anthropology, cross-cultural psychology, intercultural communication, etc.). Much interesting information, though not specifically targeted at technology design. You can get to "The Edge" - the e-journal of intercultural relations - from this site. One of the issues of this e-journal is devoted to technology issues, though primarily computer-mediated communication across cultures.

Internet Resource List
http://www.world-ready.com/r_intl.htm
Nancy Hoff, a pioneer from technical communication, has compiled a list of her favorite Internet resources on globalization.

Globalization resources
http://www.xerox-emea.com/globaldesign/free.htm
Globalization tips from Richard Ishida of Xerox, one of the Globalization gurus. You can also get to some of Richard's writings from this site.

Role of Culture in the Globalisation of Human-Computer Systems, Donald L. Day (Guest Editor) Special double issue of Interacting with Computers 1998
http://www.hcibib.org/gs.cgi?terms=J.IWC.9.;Globalisation
Abstracts are available here with a link to the publisher if you decide to purchase the issue.

Back to the Top

The Digital Divide

We risk critically increasing the separation between the "haves" and "have-nots" in the world if the benefits of technology are not available to everyone. Not only does technology hardware need to be accessible, but also user interfaces need to be designed for people who do not share the Western cultures that have to this point given rise to Internet technology. Follow these links to understand more about how this critical area:

Bridges.org
http://www.bridges.org/
Bridges.org is an international non-profit organization combining ground-level information and communication technology (ICT) initiatives with ICT policy to help span the digital divide. Based in South Africa and the US, their efforts are global. This is an excellent place to start if you want to understand some of the creative approaches to addressing digital divide issues, with many links, and intelligent articles.

The Digital Divide Network
http://www.digitaldividenetwork.org/content/sections/index.cfm
A US-based site with many interesting links. There is also a search capability that lets US-based users search for local programs addressing these issues (many of them educational or library-based) using a zip code.

Digital Opportunity Task Force (DOT Force)
http://www.dotforce.org/
The DOT Force, was created by the G8 Heads of State at their Kyushu-Okinawa Summit in July 2000. It brought together 43 teams from government, the private sector, non-profit organizations, and international organizations, representing both developed and developing countries, in a cooperative effort to identify ways in which the digital revolution can benefit all the world's people, especially the poorest and most marginalized groups. This site details the action plans coming out of these meetings, and reports on updates. The reports from the meetings are also linked on this site. A good place for an overview of some of the political processes at work in this critical area.

DigitalDivide.org
http://www.digitaldivide.org/
An online initiative out of Harvard (Center for International Development) and MIT (Media Lab) that is currently focusing on the very nature of "policy" which is changing in the digital era. It is their position that innovation policy solutions must be crafted to continue the successful global build-out of the Internet so that each country, despite considerable economic constraints, must "shape 'e-policies' that open floodgates learning, entrepreneurship, and investments."

United Nations Development Programme Information and Communications Technology
http://sdnhq.undp.org/it4dev/
Information on this program as well as a long list of really wonderful success stories from the field. Global in scope.

"Who's not online"
http://www.pewinternet.org/reports/toc.asp?Report=21
A report from the Pew Internet and American Life Project on the American digital divide landscape in September 2001. Check the main site for other interesting reports: http://www.pewinternet.org/index.asp

And some interesting examples of progress (check bridges.org for many more):

"Delhi children make play of the net"
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_1502000/1502820.stm
A report of an experiment by the Indian government, local institutions and the World Bank, which showed that children in the slums of Delhi can quickly teach themselves the rudiments of computers and the internet. The study was done and replicated to see what role computers might play in educating India's illiterate millions.

"Cambodian Village Wired to Future"
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A16336-2001May11
Interesting story from the Washington Post about how a two computers, powered by solar panels and hooked up to the Internet are transforming the economy and culture of a Cambodian village.

Back to the Top

Accessibility and "universal usability" of the Web

Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)
http://www.w3.org/WAI/
The World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) commitment to lead the Web to its full potential includes promoting a high degree of usability for people with disabilities. WAI, in coordination with organizations around the world, pursues accessibility of the Web through five primary areas of work: technology, guidelines, tools, education and outreach, and research and development

Resources for developing accessible sites
http://www.w3.org/WAI/Resources/#gl
An excellent set of resources to help you create accessible websites and to tell if sites are accessible.

WebAIM
http://www.webaim.org/
The Web Accessibility "How to" site. Many links to other resources and training on why and how to design accessible sites.

Bobby Worldwide
http://www.cast.org/bobby/
Bobby was developed by the Center for Applied Special Technology (CAST) and allows you to determine how accessible web pages are. Just enter the URL of the page that you want Bobby to examine and click Submit. There is also a downloadable version for larger scale testing.

Back to the Top