[Sighci-l] HCI - live or let die?

[Murray Turoff]

Having taught HCI for over twenty years at the graduate and
undergraduate level to students in Computer Science and in Information
Systems to a population which represents a 1/3 working students at the
undergraduate level and 2/3 working students at the graduate level I am
always amazed at the completely lack of knowledge on the part of the
students on how to design interfaces, how to use basic protocol analysis
and how to understand user cognitive processes.

It is not a field that is practiced in most companies and many of my
students have told me about being able to introduce many of the concepts
in their job environment and the resulting improvements they can make.

I think it will be a long time before it is obsolete with respect to the
need to provide education in the area and I also think there are many
open questions and design challenges and research as our systems become
increasing complex and integrated.

Most systems are being designed for the lowest common denominator.  The
person that wants to play music by turning on a CD player.  The systems
for those that want to play violins (the experts in a domain) still have
largely insufficient systems to meet their needs.