Books

Human Factors for Designers of Equipment

Ministry of Defence Interim Defence Standard, Part 12: Systems. 00-25 (part 12)/ Issue 1, 15 July 1989.

The British Ministry of Defence is publishing a 12-part series of Defence Standards on Human Factors. They have their origins in the 1971 2-volume Human Factors for Designers of Naval Equipment published in 1971.

Ministry of Defence Issue 00-25 (part 12/1), on Systems, described as Interim Defence Standard Improvement Proposal, is seeking to get information and experience on its application and asking for constructive comments from its users so that the Committee can review it prior to seeking final approval and converting it to a normal standard.

The Interim Standard, within the bounds of some 60 pages, outlines the system design process and gives an overview of that process. In this overview the major techniques for designing a system are described - for example, function analysis and task analysis - together with the supporting requirements of user manual design, training programmes and system evaluation.

The next three sections enlarge on critical areas of system design, giving a necessarily brief but wider overview of relevant methods to be employed. The three areas covered are Design Aiding Techniques, Design Evaluation Techniques and a section on Methods of Experimentation, confined to one page !

The text provides 'thumbnail sketches' of a wide range of techniques with useful and practical guidance on when they are of use, as well as cautions against their possible mis-use. There is an important supporting bibliography.

E.N. Corlett

Cognitive aspects of computer supported tasks

Yvonne Waern John Wiley and Sons, Chichester, 1989. ISBN 0471911410 pp 327 + xxii, £29.95 (hardback).

A growth area in the literature of human factors in the past five years has been our own contributions to the cognitive science field. Such literature has largely been concerned with the explanation of cognitive psychology - models and theories - and discussion or, better, examples of its application to systems design. The book by Waern has the characteristic which seems tyoical of the better books in the field - it is sole-authored and is by a cognitive psychologist. As such she appears to be aiming her book to give psychology and human factors professionals and students material to help better understand the problems of human-computer interaction (HCI), rather than to teach cognitive psychology principles to systems designers.

The book has four main parts. The first (five chapters) introduces the reader to cognitive psychology, memory, reasoning and decision making and learning, and, import- antly for human factors applications, discusses individual differences. Part II, of five chapters, takes a task-based

perspective of HCI, and picks up such issues as task, user and system models, the process of writing text, database use, problem solving and expert systems, and CAD and design. Part III has four chapters devoted to the interface, mixing two traditional-type chapters on dialogue style and physical input/output mechanisms with two more unusual chapters on lexical and syntactical aspects of communication and on metacommunication. Finally, the two chapters of Part IV take an effects perspective, looking at the effects of computer use on cognitive performance and at the concept- ual effects of computer use.

By and large the book is a success in what it sets out to do. Sometimes the explanations or information come over in somewhat 'bitty' fashion and this reader's interest waxed and waned. This may have something to do with what the author calls the "tidying up of my academic Swenglish"! To attempt both to describe all cognitive psychology of relevance to computer systems design and explain such application is, though, a near-impossible task.

Certainly, a look at the book in order to check if cover- age and style are appropriate is recommended for any human factors worker in HCI. Particularly to be commended is the author's escape from the ghetto of text editing and her inclusion of problems, anecdotes, design criteria and theory application from domains such as CAD, expert systems, data-bases, as well as word processing.

John Wilson

User interface designs for computer systems

Tony Rubin Ellis Horwood, Chichester, 1988. ISBN 0-7458-0299-0, pp 195, £26.00.

This is one of those books where the reviewer wonders if it would be kinder not to produce any review at all However, there are currently a large number of human- computer interaction (HCI) books on the market, many are poor, and if a bad review reduces their number in future then all to the good.

First, the facts. The book is said by the author to be intended as a "simple, easy to read, easy to understand book" (p 11) about user interfaces to computer systems. It is aimed at students, computer scientists, software designers, office automation specialists and others. After a short introduction there are chapters on users and tasks, design issues (system response times, user help', error messages and command names), menus, input devices and WlMP interfaces, colour and evaluation. It finishes with a chapter entitled "So you want to be a professional?", over which it may be kinder to draw a veil. It contains some of the least professional writing I have read; it is probably an embarrassment to the author.

One major problem in reviewing the book is its style of writing; to this reviewer and to others he has talked to it comes across as an awkward mixture, being both patronising and schoolboyish. (An exception is the chapter on colour, by different authors!) In addition to its style the book suffers from some appalling proof reading in terms of typo- graphy and grammar, with examples it seems on almost

318 Applied Ergonomics December 1989

every page. Beyond this, it is possible to take issue with many of the author's statements, e g, " . . . . naive, novice or inexperienced (the terms are interchangeable) user . . . . " (pp 19-20) or his seeming support for decreased learning times on alphabetical as against QWERTY layout keyboards (pp 77 78). The author says in his introduction that even his 'in-depth' chapters may not be sufficiently detailed; in the case of such 'guidelines' as the factors to be considered in the design of online help systems (pp 4 5 - 4 6 ) this is certainly true.

The shame of this book is that the author works for the British Telecom Research Laboratories whose Human Factors Division have carried out much research that should be brought to the attention of the readership at which Rubin is aiming. About the only joy I had from reading it was on the first page (14) of the Introduction, where in a sentence questioning whether the laser printer used for the book can be counted as a computer there appeared both a grammatical error and a piece of clumsy printing (uneven line space) which nmst reflect either user or computer inadequacy.

John Wilson

Handbook of human-computer interaction

Martin Helander (Ed) North-Holland, Amsterdam, ISBN 0444 705368, pp 1167 + xxxiii, Dfl 490, USI~258 (hardback).

There are now two major compendiums of information on human-computer interaction, the 1987 collection entitled Readings in human-computer interaction and edited by R.M. Baecker and L.A.S. Buxton, and this volume edited by Martin Helander. The difference bet.ween the two is that the earlier collection is of previously published papers (albeit with very useful new linking material from the editors) whereas this one is almost entirely made up of new contri- butions. This does not necessarily lead to a preference for the latter; some of its chapters may have appeared in slightly different form elsewhere (chapter 2, disappointingly, has in its entirety), and Baecker and Buxton presumably chose what they believed to be the best papers from a very prolific field.

Helander's coverage, and that of his authors, is wide, taking an extremely catholic view of HCI. This is to be com- mended. Most chapters are relatively up to date, with a reasonable number of 1985-1987 references. The book is split into seven major sections, each with a number of constituent chapters. Since this is a major text these are listed here:

I Models and theories of human-computer interaction Nine chapters on such topics as metaphors, mental models, software comprehension and psychology, and

more task-oriented contributions on , /o r instance, direct manipulation and task allocation.

H User interlace design Fourteen chapters looking at dialogue issues such as menus, command names, query and natural languages, use of speech, help, graphics and windows, and at more hardware-oriented issues of image quality, keyboards, other input devices and workstations.

III Individual differences and training Five chapters on general and specific issues of expertise and user types.

IV Applications of computer technology Six chapters on general application for text, CAD, lay- out and robots.

V Tools for design and evaluation Eight chapters - more than usually found in books on the area - are devoted to this vital topic, covering most approaches and issues of relevance.

VI Artificial intelligence Five chapters covering HCI in expert systems, decision support systems and so on.

VII Psychological and organisational issues Five chapters on broader areas within HCI.

A book of such size and diversity is hard to do justice to in a single review. Suffice it to say that already the reviewer has used several chapters in his teaching and one or two as a research resource. By and large the chapters are what such a book needs - competent and complete if unexciting surveys of an area, generally logically presented. I do have a number of quibbles; the book lacks some overall feel and philosophy. An overview chapter on HCI at the start, and editorial material both linking chapters within sections and also showing how the sections fit together, would have been useful. The editor, though, must have had enough work just putting the collection together. Perhaps more serious, and despite the fact that many major authorities in the field are authors, there is a very strong North American bias. Very few chapters and only eight authors in total are European and none is from elsewhere outside, the USA. It is possible that a less formal approach to the' subject would have been apparent with a greater spread of authorship

Such quibbles apart, however, this is obviously a fine addition to the field. Even at its high price I would recom- mend it to academics, and to systems design and research groups, and would suggest that students and others who cannot afford to buy it at least obtain access, in order to gain a fairly complete picture of the basis of HCI research and practice.

John Wilson

Applied Ergonomics December 1989 319