Advances in human-computer interface design: A report on the 14th Annual Symposium and Open House of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab

Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science, Aug/Sep 1997 by Rough, Alan C

On Friday, May 30, 1997, the Human-Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL) of the University of Maryland's Institute for Advanced Computer Studies held its 14th Annual Symposium and Open House, in College Park, Maryland. The symposium, with the theme of Universal Access, attracted 227 people to the College Park campus interested in learning more about HCIL's current research efforts. This was the largest audience for any HCIL symposium to date. Symposium attendees received copies of display images and Technical Reports for the presented papers and a videocassette: HCIL 1997 Reports, May 1997, all of which are available from HCIL (http://www.cs.umd.edu/projects/hcil/). Since so much of the material presented at the symposium was visual in nature, the videocassette provides graphic information which is impossible to explain adequately in print.

After the opening remarks by Richard Herman, dean of the College of Computer, Mathematical and Physical Sciences, Ben Shneiderman, head of HCIL, spoke about the challenges of making informed decisions in an information rich environment. Important decisions are often based on an incomplete or incorrect understanding of the relevant data sets. The key is to present the data in a way that provides the decision maker with structured information that facilitates decision making with a high degree of success.

To illustrate one solution, he demonstrated Spotfire, a commercial product for data mining from IVEE Development (www.ivee.com). Spotfire uses a starfield display, originally developed at the University of Maryland, to view tens of thousands of data points with as many as five attributes per data point. (An unexpected bonus for conference attendees included the right to download a free copy of Spotfire for personal use.)

User Interface Design

The first address of the day was Elastic Windows for Rapid Multiple Window Management. Unfortunately, most World Wide Web (WWW) page designers do not make it easy to backtrack and navigate effectively and efficiently through a site. Elastic Windows offers an effective navigation tool for viewing multiple Web pages, in a screen filling, flexible, tiled environment. As links on WWW pages are accessed, all previously examined pages remain visible hierarchically organized into sub-groups in proportionally elastic, automatically resized windows. Multiple pages can also be opened as a single operation. It is easy to use and easy to understand, if difficult to describe. Figure 1 shows an Elastic Windows screen with multiple windows open side by side. (For further information, see http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/ kandogan/wwwscenario/script.html.) It is the kind of interface that sells itself immediately. You are continuously aware of your present and past locations in a site. Although Elastic Windows is not quite ready for distribution, it is one of a new generation of tools that will simplify WWW searching in the near future.

In the next presentation, Tightly Coupled Views, Chris North reviewed the Visible Human project, which demonstrates the strength of linked images. Images can be linked hierarchically, structurally and relationally. He noted that Elastic Windows is only one example of a tool that can link images and documents. Other tools also include the ability to provide synchronized scrolling between WWW documents and their HTML source code, for instance. All of these strategies offer information seekers a better sense of "place" as they navigate.

Further examples of linked data sets were presented in two papers which used LifeLines for personal histories. LifeLines had originally been developed by HCIL researchers for the Maryland Department of Juvenile Justice in order to track youth offender records. That research led in a new direction reported in Visualizing Medical Patient Records with LifeLines. It provides physicians with a single screen summary of visits, medications, lab reports, imaging, immunizations, hospitalizations, etc. When linked to pharmacological information, it has enough power and flexibility to monitor whether a patient is ordering too much or too little of prescribed medications. Patterns of doctor visits can also be observed.

To test the concept, further research led to a second paper on LifeLines-LifeLines vs. Tabular Format: An Experiment. Preliminary work suggests that inexperienced users can make correct assumptions from data faster and more accurately using LifeLines than with tabular information. Further research will test the concept with trained professionals and data sets that are further enhanced with exact dates, attribute decoding and the spread of overlapping events.

Not everyone is able to respond effectively to spacial and visual information. Some individuals respond better to verbal and auditory cues. In the talk, The Effects of Spacial Visualization Abilities on Dual Task Performance, researchers discussed the task of determining whether individuals with a low degree of spacial visualization ability (SVA) are at a disadvantage in a multitasking learning environment. If so, further research will suggest new ways to improve the performance of low SVA individuals.