HFES/IEA 2000 - A Trip Report
Maya Venkatraman, Sun Microsystems, mayavenkatraman@yahoo.com
The joint session of the Annual Meeting of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society and the Triennial Congress of the International Ergonomics Association (HFES/IEA 2000) was held in San Diego from July 29th to August 4th 2000. (The Internet Technical Group is one of the several technical groups that are a part HFES. Internetworking is a publication of ITG). This report summarizes the Internet Technical Group Sessions within HFES/IEA 2000.
Introduction
More than forty years ago, the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society was founded in the city of San Diego. The same sun drenched city played host to the millennium session of HFES. The Annual HFES meeting this year was combined with the triennial meeting of the International Ergonomics Association. This meant greater international participation and a greater breath in the kinds of issues presented at the conference. The meeting was attended by 2000 people, and was set to a great start by a fiery Keynote address by Brian Peacock and some rousing music.
Internet Technical Group membership numbers are growing and are well beyond the 2000 mark. The sessions at the conference also highlighted the success of this Technical Group. About 25 papers and posters were presented at the 5 ITG sessions and 2 interactive demo sessions. Compare this to the last meeting of HFES where there were a handful of internet related presentations and the last IEA meeting in Tampare (1997) were there were no more than 3 or 4 presentations related to the internet! Most ITG sessions were very well attended - with rooms filled to capacity and beyond. Judging by the level of interest and the quality of the presentations, it seemed obvious that ITG had arrived!
Overview of the Sessions
The two dozen odd ITG presentations dealt with several issues including Site Design, Web User Modeling, Usability Evaluation, Ergonomics via the inter/intra-net, Search and Navigation on the internet, Accessibility, Internationalization and Futuristic Applications. An overview of the contents of these sessions is presented here.
Usability and Modeling
Have you wondered how performance of a site on various usability criterion actually affects the sites popularity? Alfred Lee from Beta Research presented a study designed to assess effects of website usability on user ratings of site usefulness and site visit frequency. Results from the study showed that site's comparative usability and usefulness rating were influenced by the ease with which information could be located. Surprisingly, for the GIS sites studied, other variables such as mean load time of Web site page contents or the average time it takes for site to load page contents, did not reliably influence the ease with which site tasks were performed or the comparative usability rating of the site. Selvidge, Chaparro and Bender found, in their study, that delays in web page download did not influence how lost participants felt, however that delays did influence how frustrated users felt while navigating through the world wide web. Belager and Iozo from Zepher, presented a case study detailing how they adapted the User Centered Design process to work for them in internet time. Confer and Batra presented details of their design process which integrates distinct techniques, knowledge, and experience from fields of cognition, human computer interaction, systems engineering, and usability engineering and is used to formulate new Internet based ventures.
Design
The design presentations tried to answer several basic questions on site structure and page layout. While investigating the effect of depth and breadth in the arrangement of links in a web page Zaphiris found that task completion time increased as the depth of the web site structure increased. Lirn and Wogalter's study investigates the optimal position for placing banners on a web page. Results showed that participants better recognized the content of banners positioned on the top left and bottom right corners than the top right and bottom left corners. This and other results presented in this paper can be used to design better sites and for more effective placement of advertisement banners.
Search and Navigation
Search engines use several ill-defined metaphors and do not present relevant information about underlying search logic to the user. To make matters worse these logic rules and metaphors are not consistent across search engines. Andre investigates the effect of these phenomenon on Online User Experience. In a paper about online search strategies, Thatcher reports that experts and novices have different search patterns (for instance, experts conduct several parallel searches using various search engines while novices use one search engine to conduct several serial searches. Results from the study also indicate that the search strategies depend on the task. Bernard & Barbara S. Chaparro, in their paper titled Searching within websites: "A comparison of three types of sitemap menu structures," compared search performance
and satisfaction with three types of sitemap menu structures - alphabetical, categorical and two stage categorical (click on category name to see links) and results indicated that while there were we significant performance difference the alphabetic arrangement was rated the least satisfactory.
International Design
Rau presented results from a survey to investigate naming rules to design user names for Chinese electronic mail users. In another presentation Rau presented results from Usability Tests of Chinese portals in Taiwan.
Accessibility
In a paper entitled 'Web access for visually impaired people using active accessibility,' Zajicek, Venetsanopoulis, and Morrissey presented the integration of a simplified Web browser for the blind and partially sighted - BrookesTalk, with Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0 using Microsoft Active Accessibility.
Future Applications
Not so far in the future, we may all be using the web to immerse ourselves in a remote environment or to control objects in a remote environment. Muralidhar, Meyer, Abrams, and Bishu examined the cognitive impact of integrating Virtual Reality into an online retail experience while Song and Kaber focused on identifying human factors issues related to current web-based tele-operation systems.
The Ergonomics - Internet Interface
Several organizations have used the web to provide ergonomic information or services. Three papers at this conference highlighted this interface between Ergonomics and the internet. We heard about Ford Motor company's project that permits plant-level Local Ergonomics Committees (LECs) to manage the process for identifying, tracking, resolving and sharing ergonomic concerns with reduced administrative burden. Kesler and Romero presented a web based method to conduct office ergonomic evaluations that resulted in a cost savings of 73%. Byrne, discussed using the internet for Ergonomic Training.
A special session highlighted the lastest developemtns in website design and testing. In addition to the sessions, Pawan Vora conducted a successful work shop on Designing Usable E-Commerce Websites. Last but not the least, the Internet Technical Group Meeting took place. We all got a chance to see other members, recount some of the success of the past and plan future events.
Relevant Links
- HFES: www.hfes.org
- ITG: http://www.sandia.gov/itg/
- ITG Program at HFES IEA - 2000: http://www.sandia.gov/itg/newsletter/mar00/itg_program.html
© Internet Technical Group
Last update: September 24, 2000
URL: http://www.sandia.gov/itg/newsletter/aug00/hfweb_2001.html
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