Usability

It’s easy to get confused, especially nowadays, when even apparently respectable financial institutions are crumbling. But at a much more modest level, every time I see the abbreviation UN, I get confused between the United Nations and Usability News – the electronic newsletter of the British Computer Society Human Computer Interaction Group http://www.usabilitynews.com/. It is probably not a mistake many people would make, but it got me thinking about how much the papers which Ahmet Cakir (the Editor-in-Chief) has selected for this issue of Behaviour & Information Technology (BIT) illustrate that usability is also a global issue. We have always been proud of the international nature of BIT. Publishing in English clearly makes it more difficult for non-native speakers but I have been impressed over the years by how many have recognised that BIT is a great way to get to a wide and informed international audience. In this issue, I am delighted we have papers from Malaysia, France, China, Germany, Canada and Israel as well as the USA and the UK. Object-oriented technology changed the face of computing and arguably represented the start of the transformation of computing from a technology to support computation to a more general information technology. In many ways, it was one of the key drivers of usability. The first paper in this issue is a comparison of different ways of documenting frameworks to support the re-use of object-oriented code. S.B. Ho, I. Chai and C.H. Tan from the Faculties of Information Technology and of Engineering at the Multimedia University, Cyberjaya in Malaysia have derived some guidelines for effective framework documentation for the Swing Framework from a survey of 140 novices engaged in Swing intensive coding work. Object-oriented technology is also the focus for the next paper from Hugh Robinson and Helen Sharp at the Maths and Computing Faculty, Open University in the UK. They present a history of object-oriented technology from an analysis of contemporaneous materials. They cover the period from the late 1970s, when object orientation was an obscure little known interest amongst some computer scientists, until the early 1990s, when object-oriented technology was widely accepted as a major technology. They identify three phases of emergence: interpretative flexibility; community and dissemination; and pervasiveness. They describe the role of various communities, constituencies, fora and programming languages, and show how the intellectual history of an idea underpinning a technology differs from that technology’s path of adoption. The spread of computing from the laboratory to everyday life brought a greatly expanded non-technical population into close contact (often closer than they really wanted!) with technology. For some people, this contact creates anxiety, which has a negative impact on their perception of ease of use. D. Fakun from LERASS (CHOCQ) at the Université JF Champollion in Albi, France reports a study of this relationship. The paper explores what developers can do to mitigate the relationship in order to increase user acceptance, in the context of a hypertext/hypermedia application. It makes a number of recommendations aimed at ensuring systems exceed user expectations in order to overcome this negative relationship. Nowhere has the pervasiveness of computing been more obvious than in the so-called smart home. Although I must confess a certain scepticism about just how smart are such features as curtains which close when you clap your hands or lights which come on when it is dark! The reality, of course, is that such simple automation is not really smart – we may want to clap at other times or leave the curtains open at night. What is required is an interface which allows the user to interact with the home system to achieve a much more complex set of results. The problem is that smart homes will be particularly useful for people who may not usually be comfortable with computers. Bin Zhang, Pei-Luen Patrick Rau and Gavriel Salvendy from the Department of Industrial Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing in China and the School of Industrial Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette in the USA report a series of experiments on the effects of such factors as age and task complexity on the performance of tasks with smart home systems. They explored interactions between the sophistication of the interface and skills of the users. As one might Behaviour & Information Technology Vol. 28, No. 3, May–June 2009, 199–200