Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ames!amdcad!sun!pitstop!sundc!seismo!uunet!mcvax!ukc!dcl-cs!nott-cs!edward.cs.bham.ac.uk!mas
From: mas@cs.bham.ac.uk (Angela Sasse <SasseMA>)
Newsgroups: comp.cog-eng
Subject: Re: Technological overcomplexity in 1523
Message-ID: <377@edward.cs.bham.ac.uk>
Date: 30 Aug 88 19:01:47 GMT
References: <3506@rlvd.UUCP>
Organization: Birmingham University, England
Lines: 48


>A second line of research has been into more psychological measures
>of cognitive style (e.g. extravertion/introversion, visualiser/verbaliser,
>field-dependent/independent) and how interfaces can be modified to 
>optomise on these variables. Obviously, part of the problem here is 
>selecting a suitable test to establish a categorisation of the user.
>
>Ref: Fowler, C.J.H. and Murray, D.M. (1987) Gender and cognitive
>style differences at the human-computer interface. In Proceedings
>of INTERACT '87, Stuttgart, West Germany, September 1987.

Wrong - a categorisation of the user won't get you anywhere.

The problem is that categorising users according to psychological
measures of style doesn't tell you anything about preferences for
different styles of interfaces or styles of learning, since the
theories behind these tests (a) are often extremely narrow in their
application; (b) in some cases there is no theory at all behind the 
measurement; and (c) these theories simply haven't got anything to
say about user-interface design.

In my personal experience, non-psychologists tend to be extremely
fond of applying psychological (or pseudo-psychological) constructs
to users. The line of thinking goes "If we could only categorise users
correctly, we could pull out the ideal interface for each user group."
But we still haven't got anywhere near compiling/integrating/developing
general principles of good (= sound in terms of cognitive ergonomics)
user interface design. This categorisation business is a gimmick -
trying to put icing on a cake that doesn't exist. Once we've developed
a science of the user interface, we can start worrying about that sort
of thing. And even then, the emphasis should be on theories that make
sense within the context of cognitive ergonomics, rather than recycling
dead ducks that have been thrown out by psychology (e.g. A and B types
and system response time, knowledge elicitation from introvert and 
extrovert experts).

Typically, Sheiderman (1987) lists 20 of these constructs, which could
potentially influence user behaviour, but has to admit that there is
no conclusive evidence to support this intuition. The only empirical
finding he cites is that females are significantly more fond of Pac-
man than males - due to, he speculates "stronger oral tendencies"
amongst females. What do we conclude from that - that women want an
edible interface? I rest my case.
-- 
Martina-Angela Sasse                   SasseMA@cs.bham.ac.uk
Dept. of Computer Science
The University of Birmingham
Birmingham, B15 2TT, UK