Endnotes on: accessibility for the disabled
While this is usually thought of in terms of actual physical disability, even users with no permanent disabilities can benefit for assistive technologies that ameliorate a disability's functional equivalent. This is to say, that any End User can find him or herself in a situation where he or she can't make full use of one or more of his or her senses, like having to use a cell phone to access a web site or having to use speech to query a system when hands-free operation is critical.
See T. V. Raman, Auditory user interfaces : toward the speaking computer (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997), pp. xxi, 142.
Endnotes on: The Right Thing
In many situations one approach will prove to be more flexible, more elegant, and easier to work with once it has been implemented, such an approach is said to be The Right Thing.
Unfortunately, it often takes a lot of work to do The Right Thing, leading to a countervailing approach known as Worse is Better which is generally easier to pull off in the short term, since its negative effects only build up over time.
R. P. Gabriel, Patterns of software : tales from the software community (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. xx, 235, R. P. Gabriel, "Worse Is Better," (http://www.dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html, 2000), R. P. Gabriel, "Worse Is Better Is Worse," (Published under the pseudonym Nickieben Bourbaki, 2000).
This essay makes a strong case for a Legacy-Free design approach. It is definately a must read!
This page holds a circa 1999 annotated bibliography of papers about Zoomable User Interfaces. It is maintained by The Univeristy of Maryland Human Computer Interaction Lab's Ben Bederson — an international leader in the field.
The Unix Philosophy
Mike Gancarz
Digital Press, 1995
ISBN: 1555581234
Written by one of the developers of the X Window System, this fascinating books explains "The UNIX Philosophy" - a belief system that has given us much of today's technology the character that it has. This understanding empowers us to choose a different path without the risk of repeating past mistakes.
Keywords:
The Unfinished Revolution : Human-Centered Computers and What They Can Do for Us
Michael L. Dertouzos
HarperCollins, 2001
ISBN: 0066620678
Written by the late Michael Dertouzos of the MIT AI Lab balances the humanist approach of Leonard's Laptop with a more prescriptive approach based on the application of Artificial Intelligence related technologies to the problem of developing a Human-Centric Computing.
Keywords: Human-computer interaction. User interfaces (Computer systems)
Machine Beauty : Elegance and the Heart of Technology
David Hillel Gelernter
Basic Books, 1997
ISBN: 0465045162
In "Machine Beauty", David Gelernter offers more alternatives to today's dominant interface paradigms and highlights the role that our choice of metaphors can play in limiting our design options.
Keywords: Human-computer interaction. Computer software Human factors. Computer engineering.
The Humane Interface : New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems
Jef Raskin
Addison Wesley, 2000
ISBN: 0201379376
The Humane Interface by Jef Raskin, credited as the father of the Apple Macintosh and Canon Cat, deconstructs the failings of today's User Interfaces and forces the reader to recognize that the tried and true set of assumptions that underly today's Desktop Metaphor is only one of a number of possible alternatives. This book will teach you the skills you need to look at interface design with a critical eye.
Keywords: Human-computer interaction. User interfaces (Computer systems)
Statistical Models for Organizing Semantic Options in Knowledge Editing Interfaces
Jill Nickerson
Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard Univeristy, 2002
Keywords: multi-modal interfaces
Leonardo's Laptop : Human Needs and the New Computing Technologies
Ben Shneiderman
MIT Press, 2002
ISBN: 0262194767
Written by the world famous Professor Ben Shneiderman -- one of The IEUC's Advisory Board Members -- whose work in Human-Computer Interaction has shaped the very landscape of personal computing, this text proposed a New Computing and is remarkably accessible to the non-technical reader while remaining a treasure trove for the dedicated researcher.
Keywords: Electronic data processing. Human-computer interaction. Technological forecasting.