Preface: This review was written by me for my Website ( www.jnd.org ): hence the informal writing style. Although it is not in the format I would have provided had I done a normal review for this j...

(2004). Introduction to This Special Section on Beauty, Goodness, and Usability. Human–Computer Interaction: Vol. 19, Beauty, Goodness, and Usability/Change Blindness, pp. 311-318.

Complexity refers to the internal workings of the system, difficulty to the face provided to the user -- the factors that affect ease of use. The history of technology demonstrates that the way to make simpler, less difficult usage often requires more sophisticated, more intelligent, and more complex insides. Do we need intelligent interfaces? I don't think so: The intelligence should be inside, internal to the system. The interface is the visible part of the system, where people need stability, predictability and a coherent system image that they can understand and thereby learn.

This plenary panel will explore ideas about future user interfaces, their technology support, and their social context as proposed in the work of leading authors of science fiction characterized as the Cyberpunk movement. Respondents will react to and comment upon the authors' presentations.

Direct manipulation has been lauded as a good form of interface design, and some interfaces that have this property have been well received by users. In this article we seek a cognitive account of both the advantages and disadvantages of direct manipulation interfaces. We identify two underlying phenomena that give rise to the feeling of directness. One deals with the information processing distance between the user's intentions and the facilities provided by the machine. Reduction of this distance makes the interface feel direct by reducing the effort required of the user to accomplish goals. The second phenomenon concerns the relation between the input and output vocabularies of the interface language. In particular, direct manipulation requires that the system provide representations of objects that behave as if they are the objects themselves. This provides the feeling of directness of manipulation.

The discipline of software engineering can be extended in a natural way to deal with the issues raised by a systematic approach to the design of human-machine interfaces. Two main points are made: that the user should be treated as part of the system being designed, and that projects should be organized to take account of the current (small) state of a priori knowledge about how to design interfaces.

If the field of Human Factors in Computer Systems is to be a success it must develop design principles that are useful, principles that apply across a wide range of technologies. In the first part of this paper I discuss some the properties that useful principles should have. While I am at it, I warn of the dangers of the tar pits and the sirens of technology. We cannot avoid these dangers entirely, for were we to do so, we would fail to cope with the real problems and hazards of the field.

This paper uses the analysis of human error to provide a tool for the development of principles of system design, both to minimize the occurrence of error and to minimize its effects. Eventually, it should be possible to establish a systematic set of guidelines, with explicit, quantitative cost-benefit tradeoffs that can lead toward a design discipline—a “Cognitive Engineering.” This short note starts the process.