conversations with clement mok & jakob nielsen on web & … · clement mok clement mok and...

46 i n t e r a c t i o n s . . . j a n u a r y + f e b r u a r y 2 0 0 0

CONVERSATIONSWITH

CLEMENT MOK AND

JAKOB NIELSEN, AND

WITH BILL BUXTON AND

CLIFFORD NASS

CONVERSATIONSWITH

CLEMENT MOK AND

JAKOB NIELSEN, AND

WITH BILL BUXTON AND

CLIFFORD NASS(INTERVIEWED AND EDITED BY

RICHARD ANDERSON)

(top left) Bill Buxton, (bottom left) Clifford Nass(above, left to right) Clement Mok, Jakob Nielson, and Richard Anderson

Ph

oto

by S

teven P

emberto

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Jakob Nielsen

47i n t e r a c t i o n s . . . j a n u a r y + f e b r u a r y 2 0 0 0

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itself as the architects for the new economy. In

1988, Clement founded Clement Mok

Designs, later renamed Studio Archetype, to

establish clients’ digital presence using interac-

tive media and eventually the Internet. (Stu-

dio Archetype was acquired by Sapient

Corporation during 1998.) Before forming

his own agency, Clement spent 5 years as a

creative director at Apple Computer. Clement

is the author of Designing Business: Multiple

Media, Multiple Disciplines, published by

Adobe Press.

Jakob Nielsen is a principal of the Nielsen

Norman Group, a user experience consultan-

cy. Until July 1998 he was a Sun Microsys-

tems Distinguished Engineer and the

company’s Web usability guru. Jakob coined

the term “discount usability engineering” and

has invented several usability techniques for

fast and inexpensive improvements to user

interfaces. Jakob’s most recent book is titled

Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Sim-

plicity (New Riders Publishing).

Richard Anderson: Are most Web siteswell designed?

Jakob Nielsen: Definitely no. My conclu-sion is that about 90 percent of all Web siteshave miserable, miserable usability. That doesnot mean that the other 10 percent are great;

Tapped for these interview sessions were

some of HCI’s most original thinkers.

Clement Mok and Jakob Nielsen were asked

to address the Web and Web design limits to

human–computer interaction (HCI). Bill

Buxton and Clifford Nass tackled human lim-

its to HCI. Wayne Gray and Bill Gaver com-

pared their perspectives on methodological

limits to HCI. And Don Norman and Janice

Rohn squared off to address organizational

limits to HCI. The interviewer was the Inter-

views Chair for CHI 99—Richard Anderson,

whose work is all about setting the stage for

avoiding or overcoming limits to HCI and

who has conducted several interview sessions

over recent years on the stage of the BayCHI

program.

Two of those CHI 99 sessions are repro-

duced here. At least one of the other sessions

will appear in an upcoming issue.

Web and Web Design Limitsto HCI: A Conversationwith Clement Mok andJakob NielsenThe first session paired individuals who have

come to the Web from very different places.

Both have made impressive contributions to

the Web and to Web design.

Clement Mok is chief creative officer of

Sapient Corporation, a consultancy that bills

Richard I. Anderson

Usability/Design/

Discovery Adventures

63 Woodside Lane

Mill Valley, CA 94941

(415) 383-5689 x2

Fax: (415) 383-5187

[email protected]

[email protected]

[email protected]

http://www.well.com/

user/riander/

TThe 1999 Conference on Human Factors in Computing (CHI 99) had as its theme “The

CHI is the Limit.” At the conference, participants posed the following questions: What

are the limiting factors to the success of interactive systems? How can we enable users

to overcome those limits? What techniques and methodologies do we have for iden-

tifying and transcending limitations? And just how far can we push those limits? This

theme and its questions provided a framework for the first live interview sessions to

be conducted at a CHI conference.

Clement Mok

Clement Mok and Jakob Nielsen

and have been very comfortable with. Inlooking at the Web and the Internet, eachcommunity or discipline needs to fundamen-tally look at their genetic makeup and theirDNA and at what they consider “good” tobe, and then challenge the assumptions onwhich they base their views.

Jakob Nielsen: Actually, I think that a lotof the things that we do know are still wait-ing to be applied. This applies to the soft-ware. . .for example, makers of Webbrowsers still need to implement a lot of thethings that we knew in the hypertext field10 years ago. If we would just do what weknow, we would get better browsers.

Regarding Web sites, I’m leaning towardthe view now that Web sites are just funda-mentally never going to really make it. WhenI say “never,” I mean in the next 10 years orso, because any substantial Web site is a con-tribution of a very large number of people.You can have a central design team in a com-pany that is in charge of the home page andin charge of the information architectureand search and big picture kinds of things. Inmany companies, there are decent peopleworking on these things who have a decentclue as to how to do them. So, those thingsmay in fact be done well. But, take five clicksfrom the home page, and what are yougoing to get? Something horrible done by aproduct marketing manager in Kentucky. Sothe challenge is not just to get the centralWeb team back at headquarters to under-stand how to do good Web design, becausewe are achieving that via our speeches andbooks and consulting and such. The chal-lenge is to get the thousands of people whoare contributing their content to understandgood Web design; that is a much harder chal-lenge—a challenge that I don’t think will bemet over the next 10 years.

Intranet design is even worse, becausethere you have some random person in thenext department creating Web pages. It’s along time coming before we get all thesepeople to understand how to do Webdesign well.

Richard Anderson: Talk about some of

it just means that they are acceptable. Thatalso does not mean that users spend 90 per-cent of their time at bad Web sites. Peoplespend most of their time at the good sites,but if you look across all Web sites, the vast,vast majority are extremely difficult to use.

Clement Mok: I’m going to answer verymuch like a graphic designer as well as anart director: it depends. I honestly don’tthink that our criteria for good Web sitedesign have been determined. The very factthat we quickly make judgment calls aboutwhat is good reflects a bias; our judgmentsare loaded and are colored by a set of lenses.Jakob is from a constituency in this commu-nity that is coming to the Web from soft-ware development, while I and others cometo the Web from the world of communica-tion design. We both have a bias going intothis world, and within those limited param-eters say things like, “good is about clarityof communication;” or “good is aboutusability;” or “good is about performance,”when in fact, a good Web site is all thesethings with nuances of gray in-between.

Richard Anderson: Clement, in your bookDesigning Business, you talk about how oldhabits die hard. What are some of the oldhabits that you believe are holding us backor slowing things down in Web design?

Clement Mok: Old habits holding us backreflect the things that we don’t know; wevery often fall back on things that we know


Richard Anderson


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interface is your customer interface; the twoare the same. Therefore, you need usabilityto be there, because if people can’t use theWeb site, they are going to become cus-tomers of some other company.

But the right business model also has to bethere.

On the other hand, we should not be say-ing that you can’t design any Web site unlessyou have a team of 50 people, includingthree Harvard MBAs. Sometimes just oneperson is enough. But in that case, you haveto have all these little hats to put on. Andyou’ll need to put on your little usability hatonce in awhile and say things like, “Let mego and get some other person in and see ifthey can use the site.” So even if you’re theonly person involved, you still need to getthat outside perspective.

Richard Anderson: Jakob, the workingtitle of your upcoming book is Secrets of anInformation Architect. What are some ofthose secrets?

Jakob Nielsen: I can’t tell you; you’ll haveto buy the book! (audience laughter)

There are a lot of different levels of infor-mation architecture, and some of the morefine-grained levels may not be appreciated. The bigger level deals with how to structurethe entire information space. That is oftenthe focus of the professional informationarchitect or is why you need several peopleon the team, because that’s not somethingthat your average marketing person or aver-age writer will be able to do.

There is also information architecture inthe small, like when you’re constructing astory—let’s say a product description. Thatproduct description should not just be apage, it should be a set of pages, and archi-tecting that set of pages is informationarchitecture in the small. This may notrequire a professional information architect;the marketing person might be appropriatefor that level of information architecture.

You can get even smaller to answer ques-tions like, “When it’s just a few pages, howdo you connect them?” An analogy is thework of an interior architect compared to

the disciplines you both say need to beinvolved in the design of Web sites. Whatare some of them, and why should they beinvolved?

Clement Mok: Let me start with just a fewfrom my perspective. The Internet startedout to be a communication medium, so thediscipline and craft of communicationdesign is apropos for Web site design. Butthe Web has evolved into a way of doingbusiness, a way to conduct transactions. Soskills that have to do with interactiondesign, software design, application design… are needed.

But those are just the surface disciplines.You also need to have a good understandingof the psychology and the social sciencebehind how people interact with the world.Understanding the ergonomics of howsomething is used is not enough. The Inter-net and how we deal with the Internet isonly a part of a bigger picture. We need tounderstand how it all fits in with our dailylives.

That entire spectrum of disciplines is need-ed. It might be difficult to apply all disci-plines on every single project. But when onelooks at the projects out there and the kindsof Web sites that get implemented—manyfall short because these disciplines are notapplied.

Jakob Nielsen: I agree that you need allthese different disciplines. And you can addmore. In the future, we will probably havemore multimedia on the Web, so you willneed people who know about film produc-tion or audio design. Right now, the Web ismostly visual design and text and informa-tion architecture, but we will keep adding asit changes.

Today the Web is also the main driver forbusiness strategy. So you also need peoplewho understand business models.

I’ve been known to make lots of snideremarks about marketing people. Actually, Imake snide remarks about clueless market-ing people. You need clued-in marketingpeople who understand that the Web isyour connection to the customer. The user

Clement Mok

article or go into a headline. When writingheadlines for print, you can very often useteasers, puns…fun headlines, while thatdoesn’t really work in the Web. In the Web,you have to be much more straightforwardand describe clearly, in that one headline,what the page is about, because people arenot going to spend the time reading the restof the page. In the Web, remember that thedefault is that you arrive at a bad page.When a user goes to a new page, on aver-age it’s bad—on average it’s “Back” buttontime; users don’t give a second to decidewhether they want to dig into the page.Sure, people also take a short amount oftime to decide whether to dig into a printarticle, but they can more easily see the pho-to illustrations, because they are immediate-ly there; in the Web, the illustrations aregoing to come downloading later. In print,it’s easier to read subheadings or additionaltext in addition to the big headline; on theWeb, only a few things dominate.

In a study I did recently with Mark Hurst,we looked at how people could apply forjobs online, and the result was horrible. Inone example, the person proceeded througha series of steps and finally arrived on a pagethat had the headline that read, “You’venow completed the job application.” Sowhat did the user do at this point? The usersaid, “Ah, good, I’m done,” and closed thething. Now if the user had bothered to readthe body text, she would have seen “blah,blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and by the way,we want to make sure that you are reallysure this is the correct thing to do, so pleasepress a confirm button to actually enter yourapplication into the database.” Nobodyreads that body text. Users don’t click the lastbutton that says, “Not only am I done, but Iconfirm that I’m done.” The person wentthrough all the steps, did all the work, andthought she was done because of the head-line, and she lost all her work.

Clement Mok: Jakob, you are drawingsome very broad generalizations aboutthings that don’t work. In the world of com-munication design, we consider appropri-ateness and context. What you said might

the architect of the building; different peo-ple work at different levels. In informationarchitecture, it’s specialized informationarchitects for some things, Web site editorsfor others, and also people who are respon-sible just for a set of pages for a certainevent, a product, or an article.

Clement Mok: It’s interesting how infor-mation architecture has very different inter-pretations in different communities. AtSapient, we define information architecturevery differently than Jakob just defined it.The practice of information architecture inour firm is also very different and is actuallymore specialized. We look at informationarchitecture within the framework of a con-cept. Yes, we use the word “information,”and we also use the word “architecture,”but we look at the information architecturefrom the perspective of the user. We focuson user experience and on what users wantout of their experience, and we do so with-in the framework of a concept as opposed tothe thing being created.

There needs to be more discourse aboutthe language of information architecture,because it is a word that gets misused andhas very, very different meanings within dif-ferent communities.

Richard Anderson: Jakob, you have writ-ten and also spoken lots about how peopleread on the Web, and you’ve said that toomany sites are designed by print people withadvertising backgrounds. What is or whatshould be the difference between Webdesign and print design?

Jakob Nielsen: I think that there is a verylarge number of differences. There is the dif-ference in page layout, where in print youhave a fixed canvas you can work with, andthe entire thing is immediately presented tothe reader when the reader turns a page in amagazine. On the Web, download time dom-inates usability to a great extent, plus youdon’t really know what the user has on-line,therefore you cannot control every pixel.

Another difference lies in the writing ofthe words that go on a page or go into an


Jakob Nielsen

be true for that job application, but youimply that it is applicable to every Web site.Attributes of tease and the ability to pro-voke or to communicate desirability or lustor … all these things do and should play animportant role in the Web.

Jakob Nielsen: I think those things shouldbe put elsewhere, not in headlines.

Clement Mok: Put them elsewhere?Where?

Jakob Nielsen: Well, you still have thebody text, and you do have things like illus-trations. Note that I don’t say “have nographics;” I say, “minimize the graphics.”

Richard Anderson: Along those lines,Jakob, you say that of “look and feel” onthe Web, ”feel” is more important.

Jakob Nielsen: Right.

Richard Anderson: Elaborate on that.

Jakob Nielsen: Basically, the Web is a veryuser-driven environment. You go to a Website to get what you want, when you wantit, how you want it. That is the feeling ofgoing to a Web site. So, if the Web site feelsaccommodating, feels that you’re in control,feels that it’s giving you what you want…that gives you a good, good feeling—a goodexperience of being there. That feeling is toa great extent dominated by the simple factof speed. Speed is not the only thing thatmatters, but it’s very important. If you justsit there and wait, whatever comes might begood, but you often get annoyed by thewait. In the studies, anyway, users say it’s notworthwhile waiting. You get this irritatingfeeling that this Web site is sluggish andthat it’s slowing you down. You think thatthey think that they are more importantthan you are. They’re not really giving youservice. It’s sort of like entering a physicalstore and finding sales clerks all dressed infancy Armani suits and not wanting to talkto the customers. Now that’s a bad store.Those are not helpful sales clerks.

Clement Mok: It’s really about relevancyand context. If you walk into a store whereall the clerks have on white lab coats, youwould still have a problem. You might think,“Wow, yeah, things are really efficient,”because they all dress alike, they look likesales people, and you know how to findthem. But that is just as much of a problem.It’s too clinical; it’s a very industrial-strengthway of dealing with things. There is a warm-and-fuzzy component that needs to bethere.

In short, there are no absolute rules. Theminute that everyone thinks there are andfollows them, the Web will lose its relevancyfor the user.

Jakob Nielsen: I think it’s a matter ofdegree or where the main emphasis is. Forexample, with print, the “feel,” so to speak,comes from leafing through the magazine.So it has some importance, but the “look”dominates. On the Web, because you aredriving and you are moving, the “feel” dom-inates, which is not to say that the “look” isirrelevant. It’s a matter of the balancebetween the two components.

Clement Mok: Consider an art gallery. Ifthere’s no “look,” it’s going to be hard forthat art gallery to be compelling. Is that nottrue?

Jakob Nielsen: On the other hand, con-sider the Web site of The Museum of Mod-ern Art; that Web site is really unpleasant touse. For example, they don’t have thebiggest part of their collection online. Theydo use thumbnails, but I don’t think they usethem effectively. At least that was truewhen I looked at it a month ago.

Clement Mok: Nothing is absolute.

Jakob Nielsen: Okay. It is certainly truethat if you want to be able to get to a high-resolution scan of a painting, that may in facttake a minute to download. But before youget to that, you want something that saysthere are these 10 or 20, or even better, athousand paintings online for you to look at.


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understand all our special terminology. Inthe various project meetings, designers haveto stand up for the poor users because theyare not there. Hopefully, every now andthen they are brought in for a usability test.But, on a day-to-day basis, it’s the designer’sresponsibility to stand up for the user.

Richard Anderson: Clement, in yourbook you talk about how some of the disci-plines that you believe need to be involvedin Web design are not necessarily prone tocollaboration. Is creative design such a disci-pline?

Clement Mok: Graphic designers as wellas software designers are trained and genet-ically engineered to be solo pilots. They sortof meet and get the brief; then they go offand do their magic. And I think engineersare that way, too. Inherently, and given thetraining that people have had, it is aboutbeing stars—about individually creatinggreat experiences. The Web is so complicat-ed with its many interdependencies that it’simportant to not only nurture the great cre-ative individuals, but to also create the greatsquadrons and the squadron leaders.

Richard Anderson: Are usability engi-neers prone to collaboration?

Jakob Nielsen: That’s an interesting ques-tion. Usability, at least if you take it serious-ly, is about understanding differentperspectives and understanding how otherpeople think. So, theoretically, usabilityengineers are better at collaboration. Theycan still argue and say, “No, this is how it hasto be,” and they can get very stubbornsometimes because all experience and 20years of research show that the downloadtime has to be this fast. Indeed, that is some-thing I’m going to stand on also.

Richard Anderson: How do you achievecollaboration? What is the secret to gettingpeople to collaborate?

Clement Mok: Collaboration, I think,requires engaging the individual or the

Clement Mok: I agree, but it’s the abso-lute statements that absolutely frighten me.(audience applause)

Jakob Nielsen: On the other hand, if youdon’t say these things, people are going tocontinue creating horrible, sluggish, Webdesigns.

Richard Anderson: Clement, is the waythat you design for the Web different thanthe way that you design for print?

Clement Mok: Absolutely. I think it goesback to the absolute part and the nonabso-lute part. Print is finite; it is an object that isnot temporal. The Web, on the other hand,does not have a sense of permanence; it isquite ephemeral. A Web site is not only aframework and a structure you plug compo-nents into over time. It evolves and morphsin ways that make it hard to get a sense ofwhat this one thing is at any one point. Thefundamental difference is that what you aredesigning does not have a permanent state;it is fluid and has different dimensions overtime. It is, in fact, closer to performance art;it’s hard to describe what performance art isat any one point, because it is constantly influx.

Richard Anderson: What do you consid-er to be the role of the designer? What isthe responsibility of the designer?

Clement Mok: Facilitate, mediate, inspire.

Jakob Nielsen: Also to take the users’role—to be the users’ advocate on a project.A lot of other people on projects are allfocusing on what the company wants, suchas dumping lots of messages on the pooruser. Again, the Web is so user-controlled,users are going to go where they want togo. But that fact is still new to most businesspeople. The designers are the ones whohave to stand up for the user and say thatwe have to make it easier for people to gethere, or we have to present information in away that makes sense to someone who doesnot work at this company and does not


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Jakob Nielsen: I think that most big cor-porations are doomed when it comes to theInternet, because the Internet is an environ-ment in which you are extremely close to thecustomer. It’s about direct contact. Yet thesebig companies have lots of layers of insula-tion between their decision makers and theactual customers. The decision makers neversee a customer in most of these places. Andin most of these places, the way to get pro-moted is not by doing something good forthe customers, but by being smarter thanthe other vice president. That kind of orga-nizational structure may have actuallyworked very well in the past when changewas very slow, when things moved veryslowly, and when sheer mass of scale hadmajor benefits. The Web is a much fastermoving thing.

Tight contact with the customer is becom-ing much more important. In the old days,you could send out sales people toschmooze the customers on the golf course,and that’s how you could overcome the factthat the company didn’t really care about itscustomers. Nowadays, if you don’t careabout your customers, it is blatantly obviousfrom the Web site, because it is not cus-tomer oriented, and people just go to someother place instead. So most of these bigcompanies are genetically suited to work inan old-style, industrial environment; theyare not well suited to work in an interactiveenvironment where the quality of customerservice and truly caring about the customeris the important thing.

The 100 or so of them that will survive willbe the ones in which the CEO decides thatthe Internet is the future. If there is a chan-nel conflict, too bad—we are going to go forit anyway. We are going to kill our owninternal departments instead of havingsomeone else kill them. Most companies arenot willing to do that.

Clement Mok: I agree with you on manyof your points. But when you talk about fail-ure, are you saying these companies will justgo away, or are they going to have to dealwith how they fundamentally operate theirbusiness and with how to interact with the

group to take on a change. The minute thatthe metalevel of understanding within thegroup that the group is about to do this onething is not there, collaboration is not goingto work. When people are in disagreement,they don’t buy-in at the metalevel that theyare about to alter something fundamentally.You have to operate at a concept level sothat people are engaged and ready toaccept a change.

Another piece of the equation is aboutcommunication and really listening, andabout creating a forum in which disagree-ment can happen. Agree to disagree, andcreate a respectful environment to facilitatethat. You can agree to disagree without hav-ing the respectful environment; that willdestroy collaboration.

Last but not least, I think you actuallyhave to have a physical space in which youphysically work together.

Jakob Nielsen: I also think that havingsome sort of external criterion for how toproceed can help. Otherwise, you risk every-one arguing against each other: should wedo this or should we do that? And everyonemight argue until the cows come home. Thisis where the user becomes quite important.If our main goal is to create the optimal userexperience—to really satisfy customers, thenthat can become the decision criterion. Ifyou have that idea, and we have this idea—well, they are both good ideas. What will bedecided will depend on what actually getsthe users their results faster, or on what sellsmore, which I guess is ultimately often thegoal. Having that external decision criterionis important so that the decision is not basedon who can argue the strongest.

Richard Anderson: Jakob, you have saidthat you believe that 80 percent of the For-tune 500 companies will fail, because theywon’t make the transition from the visibleworld to the virtual world.

Jakob Nielsen: Right.

Richard Anderson: Say some more aboutthat.

Jakob Nielsen

Jakob Nielsen: Well, maybe you’re right.It’s probably true in both directions. Peoplelike Clement are the ones who actuallyunderstand what they are doing to the Web.So they can be responsible for managingtheir clients or getting them to understandwhat to do.

I put it the other way around, saying thatthe company has to closely manage theagencies, because you also have this phe-nomenon where some people just go offand build a Web site—sometimes a very niceWeb site, but one that is disconnected fromthe company. That does not affect the men-tal change needed for transformation into aNet-centric corporate culture. You can havea Web site that looks wonderful and mayactually do a few things very wonderfully,but if it’s disconnected from the base com-pany, the base company is never going to bevery good. You can see this in a lot of the air-line reservation sites. They are doing nicethings on the front end, but the back end isnot intended for consumers. So it is nevergoing to be a really good travel agencyonline. That is why I say that the companymust decide it is going to be an Internetcompany and that it is going to be in controlof its projects.

Clement Mok: The way that Jakob is talk-ing about these relationships is very inter-esting. In the world that I come from, it’scalled, “managing brand—managing andextending the brand experience.” Reallytalking about what a company’s brandattributes are and what they might beallows a company to move into these newspaces. Let’s say that McDonald’s wants tocreate a personal information managementWeb site; McDonald’s brand is not going toallow them to do that with credibility evenif they are able to develop the best userexperience. It is about the connections toand relevancy with the brand that existed inthe analog world; it is about what thoserelationships are and how they’re managedand about how well brand attributes trans-fer.

At the same time, interaction with the cus-tomer online creates new brand attributes

customer through another intermediary?Are they going to have to look at who theyare, what their brand is about, and buildingcustomer confidence?

Jakob Nielsen: There are probably sever-al different transition strategies. One strate-gy is to start up another brand and sort offeed it, but basically it will grow up to be anew thing. And then you can argue, wasn’tit really the old company that transversedinto a new company? Maybe it was, and ifcompanies do that, and if you look at it thatway, the survival rate might be greater. Butthe old company is still going to shiver andbecome much smaller than it is now. I’m notso sure that 80 percent of these Fortune 500companies will die, in the sense that theywill have no revenue in 10 years or 20 years.But I think they will disappear from the list;they will be so much smaller.

What are the new companies that aregoing to grow up instead? Well, some mightbe spin-offs of some of these old companies.In many cases, they will just be completelynew companies. Those who are really doingwell on the Web today are almost all Inter-net-only companies—companies that arepure, pure Internet.

People often ask me for the secret of Ama-zon.com: how come they are so much betterthan anyone else? I don’t think they haveany secret other than that user experience istheir number one criterion: does this make iteasier for people to buy a book or more dif-ficult for people to buy a book? That is howthey decide what to do. All the older compa-nies have all these impediments in place thatmake it difficult for them to have this onecriterion of “are we going to make this easi-er for our customers or not?” They have fiveother criteria to think about as well.

Richard Anderson: Jakob, you haveargued that very few companies reallyunderstand how to use the Web or how tocompete on the Web. Yet, you have arguedthat companies must keep Web agencies ona tight leash. Shouldn’t it actually be theother way around, to the extent that that ispossible?


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zon.com. We may have had great trust inthe previous management—maybe they’restill in place, maybe they are very nice peo-ple. I have nothing against them knowingwhat Web sites I visit. However,Amazon.com might decide that was not agood investment next month and willdecide to sell them to some evil empire. Thepoint is that users are being traded like cat-tle, and as long as that’s the attitude on theWeb, that we’re eyeballs, that we’re notreally customers, that we’re not really indi-viduals, that we’re not really treasure, thatwe’re like a Third World colony set to bestrip mined—as long as that is the attitudeon the Web, users’ trust will drop and dropand drop, and people will become more andmore distrustful of any kind of offer or pro-motion that is attempted.

Banner ads are a great example of that,because users have this notion that if theyselect a banner ad they are going to getjunk—they’re not going to get what wasbeing offered. This is despite the fact thatthere are some ethical advertisers, includingthe CHI conference which advertised thissession via a banner ad, and sure enough,it’s happening. But so many other advertis-ers are not ethical; for example, they adver-tise, “Click here to speed up your Internetconnection” or whatever, and you clickthere, and it’s just an ad for some stupidthing you would never want. You get a fewof those, and at the end of the day, you sayyou will never click on an ad again.

Clement Mok: I think there is anotherdimension to trust. Trust is lost very quickly,but trust is also built up very quickly. Ama-zon.com and eBay have made explicit disclo-sures about what they are going to do withthe information users provide. This has affect-ed the amount of users’ trust; this affectedbeliefs about how they conduct business andwhat they are as companies. The building oftrust in those brands was accelerated. But, atthe same time, technology can accelerate aloss of trust and confidence in a brand ifmany key principles are violated.

Jakob Nielsen: I agree that you can build

that influence the dirt-world brand. TakeUPS as an example, which took the effort togo after Federal Express by developing arobust Web site. Now perhaps as competi-tive as Federal Express, they have developedbrand attributes of being a major technolo-gy player that have transferred to their dirt-world presence. I don’t think too manypeople are really looking at how significantsuch changes can be.

Jakob Nielsen: I think you’re right, thatdoing a good job on your online press canreflect back on your old-world press and say,“Yes, this is an efficient company, and, forexample, we can get your package out, andyou can track your package …” On the oth-er hand, it might play the other way around,which for some other companies is often thecase. Some companies try to develop abrand of being very welcoming, very servingto their customers. But, go to their Web site,and you basically can’t do a thing. I thinkthat is hurting these companies’ brands in alot of cases.

Richard Anderson: Jakob, you’vedescribed the Web as a “low trust society.”What do you mean by that?

Jakob Nielsen: The Web is a low trustsociety, because you click in something andyou get something in response, but how doyou have any clue whether it is any good?Not only that—the current atmosphere ofthe Web is that of utter disrespect for peo-ple’s rights. It’s like, “let’s trick people intogiving us their e-mail addresses, then we’llspam them forever after.” There are allthese little boxes that say “yes, I want agood offer,” but do you have any idea whatyou will get if you check those boxes. It’s toomuch about conning users caught up in theWeb; it’s not about true disclosure aboutwhat’s going on, such as saying “every twoweeks we’re going to send you a certaintype of message.”

Plus, there’s a lot of horse trading withvarious Web sites. For example, Alexa, whichis sitting on a vast database of personalinformation, was recently bought by Ama-

Jakob Nielsen

chopped up in little unpleasant page viewsto maximize the number of advertisingexposures. This will get worse and worse asthe click-through rates drop and drop anddrop. My prediction is that the click-throughrate will be cut in half every year and willreach 0.1 percent in 2001. And as the click-through rate drops and drops, there will bemore and more devious things done; adver-tisers will try to squeeze a little bit of rev-enue out of all those eyeballs.

Clement Mok: Two weeks ago, I was sit-ting on a panel with representatives of adagencies, and they were asking exactly thesame questions. “What do we do with ban-ner advertising? Is there going to be newkinds of banner advertising?” It was fasci-nating to hear that they could not think out-of-the-box and were instead thinking therewill need to be different forms of directmarketing and more advertising formats forand different ways to treat banner advertis-ing. Their solution is to not look to banneradvertising, but to look at what they needto do to develop an ongoing conversationand relationship with their customers. Untiladvertisers get burned so bad and spend somany advertising dollars without gettingany return on their investment, we will con-tinue to suffer from this whole notion ofhaving banner ads and interstitials and allsorts of other funny words; say, what thehell are those things?

Jakob Nielsen: They are just makingworse ads—more and more intrusive, moreand more annoying ads. I think people willreact more and more against that—buyingsoftware that screens out the ads, for exam-ple. That should be seen as the final cry forhelp. If it’s so bad that people actually paymoney for software to get rid of these ads,that’s a true sign that this entire strategy hasfailed.

And, Clement, your comment about rela-tionships with customers is such a key point.Good relationships are not based on takingout your club and banging a customer overthe head. If you want to have a good rela-tionship with a customer, you don’t start out

trust in the Web if you faithfully follow upon all your commitments. But the Web ingeneral is really suffering from this kind oflow trust; it is a distrustful environmentwhere people are very skeptical about anypromises that are made. However, Amazonis a company that continues to follow up;people have this notion that if they ordersomething from it, two days later it will bethere.

I’ve gotten a lot of e-mail about a certainother bookstore about its claims that booksare in stock. People have said that theylooked for a book on Amazon.com, whichdidn’t have it or said it would take threeweeks to deliver. So, they went to this otherbookstore instead, which said, “Yes, wehave it in stock and will ship it in two days.”So they bought it at this other bookstore.What happens? Three weeks went by beforethey got the book. In effect, the bookstorelied to them. Whether the bookstore lied tothem because the book was in stock until ahalf a second before they ordered it we willnever know. But those particular customerswill never buy at that bookstore again.

Clement Mok: The whole issue of fulfill-ment and of reliability of information is animportant piece of what I think is a verycomplex puzzle about trust.

Richard Anderson: How might we getaway from banner ads? Is that a possibility?

Jakob Nielsen: My answer is micro-pay-ments. Those who pay are the ultimate cus-tomers and will ultimately be the onesthings will be designed for. I don’t think wecan develop what is going to be the mostimportant communication medium in theworld if it is purely advertising based. Thatmedium is not going to serve society—it isnot going to serve people. Unfortunately,people will have to pay, and they just haveto recognize that there is no such thing as afree lunch. If you want to have a service thatis paid for by advertising, it is going to bedesigned for advertising. Articles are notgoing to be written in a way to give you thebest information; instead, they will be


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without merit.” On the other hand,Microsoft wouldn’t like to have me there,because I would also say that this so-calledintegration is just a little Band-Aid™. Wewant real integration. I can give them a listof 10 additional things they need in the nextversion.

Richard Anderson: Studio Archetypeconducted a study with Cheskin Research onthe trustworthiness of e-commerce. Saysome more, Clement, about that study.

Clement Mok: A client had come to usand said, “Design a very secure site for us,and design it so it looks like it is secure.”What??? “Looks like it is secure?” That con-founded us. Isn’t it enough to make a Website secure? The answer is “no.”

We decided we would conduct surveys, dofocus groups, etc., to try to understand whatpeople identify as trustworthy. We talked toa variety of people—from people within theindustry to total novices—about what theyfelt was important to building trust. Wefound that many of the things we hadthought were important, like securityencryption, are important, but we alsofound that building and destroying trusthappens in a short amount of time in thisInternet space. Technology performanceplays a role, security marks play a role, brandplays a role … but navigation plays the mostsignificant role in shaping trust. You canhave a no-name brand, a teeny tiny compa-ny, but if you make your Web site very clearand easy to navigate, you can build up trustvery quickly.

People’s response to several well-knownbrands was miserable. For example, peoplecouldn’t find any product in the SharperIm-age.com Web site, and they rated the com-pany very low as to the extent to which itwas trustworthy to transact business with.That navigation was of greatest significancewas the most surprising finding.

Jakob Nielsen: To me, that says that ifyou make it usable, then people will feelmore welcome and will trust it more. Theanalogy with the physical, old-fashioned

by cheating them, which is what many ofthese current ads are doing. Your approachneeds to be more trustful, more relationshipbased. Think of it more as marketing andless as advertising. Build up Web sites thatactually give customers good service. That, Ithink, is a very, very viable strategy.

However, that means that content Websites are going to lose their revenue sources.They had better think of other revenuestreams.

Richard Anderson: You made a quickreference to micro-payments. Can you say alittle bit more about those?

Jakob Nielsen: The main problem withmicro-payments is that there are too manyschemes right now. It’s not that there areany technical problems. Too many differentschemes have been invented. I think thatMicrosoft has abandoned their responsibilityto lead the industry here. They shoulddecide on one of them, put it into the oper-ating system, and just ship it from now on.That is the only way it is going to work. Peo-ple are not going to download something toplug into stuff—that just doesn’t work. Youcan say good things about Bill Gates or badthings about Bill Gates, but the fact is thathe rules the world. So, it is his job to just pickone of them. I don’t even care which one.My favorite is MilliCent™, but I don’t reallycare. Just pick one of them, and stick it intothe OS. Then the OS can become theenabling mechanism for the network econo-my. If it’s not done properly, it’s not going towork.

Actually, the Microsoft antitrust suit thatis going on is interesting, because it hingeson a user interface question: should theInternet really be part of the operating sys-tem? Should the browser be integrated ornot? Despite it being a user interface law-suit, none of the parties have dared call auser interface witness. I think it is becauseboth of them know they would be in deeptrouble. If the government called me as awitness, I would say, “Sure you need to inte-grate the browser with the operating sys-tem; kick out this stupid lawsuit—it’s

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long term. Let’s take an airline as an exam-ple. The airline can run a million ads that saytheir planes are always on time, but if thereis an hour delay every time you fly with theairline, at the end of a very small number oftrips you would say that this is not a reliableairline. It’s similar with the Web; every singleclick is delivering some service to the cus-tomer. Therefore, the feeling of the deliveryof that service determines the brand muchmore than that which some people who talkabout brand get more preoccupied with.They’re preoccupied with the superficialaspects of branding, such as how big ourlogo on the home page is. They ignore thesubstantial aspects of branding, which areabout promising the user or customer a cer-tain thing, and then delivering it. If you donot deliver it, people will very quickly learnto ignore you, because they get bombardedwith so many messages in modern society.

Clement Mok: The great digital brandsare going to be about companies who actu-ally manage reliability—reliability of provid-ing valuable information. There will bevariations, but as we move forward, thegreat brands will be about reliability ratherthan just quality.

Richard Anderson: Jakob, one of yourcolumns is entitled “Personalization is Over-rated.” Is it really?

Jakob Nielsen: Personalization is overrat-ed, because it is the bad excuse of the per-son who can’t design a good Web site. It’slike, I can’t figure out what to show to theuser, so we can just leave it up to them; sinceI don’t know to design it, I’m sure the usercan do it. That is basically the attitude youfind in some places. It is the responsibility ofthe Web designer to design that experience,that environment, for the user, so that theuser can then take or enter that environ-ment and get what they want. A navigableenvironment in which you can actually fig-ure out what to do and get what you wantnow is the more important goal.

That does not mean that there should beno customization features. It is very nice for

shop is that if you have salespeople who arehelpful, that is better, and if you have sales-people who refuse to talk with you, and youget this feeling that they have something tohide, this is not a site that really will workand where you can get things done.

Although Clement didn’t say this, theirreport about the e-commerce trust study isavailable on the Sapient Web site, and Ithink it is a very good report.

Richard Anderson: Studio Archetype hasa discipline called “brand strategy.” Whatdoes a brand strategist do?

Clement Mok: Brand strategy is abouttrying to reconcile the brand attributes inthe dirt world with the brand attributes inthis new digital world. What is the tone ofthe conversation between the two? It can bea friendly conversation or a very hostile con-versation. What it is can shape what a branddoes and determine whether the attributesare relevant or have credibility. Brand strate-gists within our firm look at this space forcompanies that are like deer standing in avehicle’s headlights and being told to gochange—to do something on the Internet orthey won’t continue to exist as a business.We are helping companies find and articu-late their brand attributes in the dirt worldand in the Internet space, then figure out apath forward as to how to change or buildcustomer perceptions. Brand strategistsmind those relationships with clients.

Richard Anderson: Jakob, I think I’veseen you quoted as saying that companiesare preoccupied with branding.

Jakob Nielsen: Well, I’m not sure I saidthat exactly, but they probably are. Thepotential downside to branding is that somepeople think of branding as image. What Iclaim branding really is is the customers’impression of you and what they actuallyget from you—in other words, the actualexperience. This goes back to the questionof whether look or feel is more important.The feel, or what you actually get, is in manyways what determines the true brand in the


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but the Macintosh team. Being part of thatteam shaped the way that I look at theworld of designing the entire user experi-ence. It is not just about the screen or thegraphics; it is about looking at how themachine, the box of that machine, and itscontents fit within the space. It is about thesupporting tutorial that goes along with themachine, and about all the demos. It is myfocus on the totality of the experience andthe need to work together to create greatexperiences that Steve and the entire Mac-intosh team influenced.

Others who influenced me were the hus-band-and-wife team of Charles and RayEames. They are designers. They try to con-nect the most mundane day-to-day thingswith technology that is useful and desirable.They have designed films. In [19]62, they didan amazing multi-image show with 30some-odd projectors at the U.S. Pavilion inNew York City, which in a way was the startof the multimedia movement. And they didthe powers of ten. They have looked at tech-nology not as the end, but as the means—the means to connect. Makingconnections—making meaningful connec-tions—is so important.

Richard Anderson: Jakob, same ques-tion.

Jakob Nielsen: Back when I was a stu-dent, I read a lot of Ted Nelson’s books:Dream Machines, Literary Machines, andthose books. They influenced me a lot andactually got me into hypertext. He wasextremely visionary, even though he neveractually shipped anything, which doesn’tmatter because he wrote some very, verygood books.

The other person I’ll mention is JohnGould at the IBM Watson Research Center.I’m actually very different from John,because I don’t go around measuring every-thing very carefully. He did. He believed thatanything you could have a discussion aboutcould be measured. He did some extremelycareful studies on how people read fromcomputer screens versus paper, and variedevery possible parameter of all that, to final-

users to get in and tweak the design: let mesee more of this or less of that, or let mealways get the weather forecast from myhome town, and so forth. I do believe in thattype of customization. What I do not believein are the cases where the system is trying tomodel or second-guess the user and stereo-type them. Do you know the infamous thingon Amazon.com that says, “Welcome back,Jakob, except if you’re not Jakob, clickhere”? It goes on to say that you reallyshould buy these crime novels. I don’t reallycare about crime novels. Yes, I bought quitea lot last week, but they were for a birthdaypresent for somebody else. It’s trying to betoo smart about it. What is very good is thatfor every book they list, they also list fiveother relevant books. Every day you areinterested in some other thing: today I aminterested in this book, so here are five oth-er books that are relevant. That is a way ofbeing driven by the users’ immediate needsand requirements. When you study thesethings with users, you will quite often getfeedback that says, “Don’t box me in; I’mnot just that person; I have broader perspec-tives and views.”

So, I’m not saying there should be no cus-tomization features; they can be useful. I’mjust saying to not rely on customization asthe main design strategy to overcome defi-ciencies in simple navigation.

Clement Mok: Another way to cut whatJakob is talking about is, in my world, called“point of view—editorial voice.” People stilllike to be led through information andresources that have a very distinct point ofview. That piece of the equation is oftenmissing.

Richard Anderson: Clement, who hasinfluenced your work and your perspective alot?

Who are the people you have greatlyadmired—people who have influenced theperspective that you are sharing with ustoday.

Clement Mok: A lot of people. One isSteve Jobs—actually, not Steve Jobs himself,

Jakob Nielsen

Richard Anderson: How has humilityplayed a role in your work, Jakob?

Jakob Nielsen: Well, I don’t know.Clement is certainly right that there is a lotof stuff we don’t know, particularly aboutthe Web, because it is so understudied. It isamazing that you have hundreds of millionsof people using the same system, and wedon’t really know why.

On the other hand, there are a lot ofthings we do know, and I think it is more myresponsibility to go out and say, “People, thisis wrong; this is what you should do.” Even ifit’s only 90 percent sure to be true, it still hasa much better chance of moving people inthe right direction, rather than overlookingthese things. If in 99 percent of the cases thatyou make download times faster you alsomake user experience better, you might aswell tell people that. Otherwise, they are notgoing to pay attention to that issue.

The concept of humility does play a bigrole in Web design. You have to rememberthat when you’re designing a Web site,you’re designing this little speck of dust inthe universe of the entire Internet. You’recontributing a tiny little minuscule incre-ment to this bigger user experience. I callthis Jakob’s Law. Jakob’s Law of User Experi-ence is that users spend most of their timeon other Web sites. No matter who you are,people spend most of their time on otherWeb sites. That says to me that you cannotdrive the user; they spend most of their timeelsewhere.

Clement Mok: Jakob, what if your “’99percent” is wrong? What if it is only 85 per-cent?

Jakob Nielsen: Well, it’s still the bigmajority, right? It is true that there is no rulethat doesn’t have an exception. Gooddesigners know the rule, and they also knowwhen to break it. However, most of the mil-lions of Web sites and billions of pages aredesigned, as I said before, by some productmarketing manager in Kentucky. You haveto tell these people the basic rules, and thenonce they get to be brilliant…

ly discover the need to have better resolu-tion. We still don’t have that needed resolu-tion, even though the need has been knownsince his studies were presented at one ofour early CHI conferences. It is a disgracethat we still have such bad screens.

John was really a great…I was a greatadmirer of him. I learned a lot from JohnGould even though I’m not doing things inhis exact style. I am more into the “let’s dosome quick-and-dirty kind of thing, and getthe insight,” rather than get all the numbersJohn would have wanted.

People like Jack Carroll, Tom Landauer,and Tog [Bruce Tognazzini] —how can younot say Tog?—also influenced me. Lots ofgood people.

Richard Anderson: In a very recent inter-view, Clement, you talked about how youlearned about humility as a student. Whatrole should humility play in the wild worldof Web design?

Clement Mok: None of us know wherewe are going. You don’t know what youdon’t know. We are colored by our pastexperiences, and we can go out and claimthat we know everything and that this is theway it should be. I have done that; we haveall done that. It is a part of human nature.It’s easy.

It’s much harder to ask, “Why not?” Whenwe take on a project, we ask our clients theappropriate list of questions, such as “Whyare you doing this?” and “What’s the busi-ness objective?” When someone off the cuffthrows in something that appears to beaudacious and bizarre, we totally discount it.In some projects, that something was a bril-liant idea, but we just threw it out the door.We should have looked at it and asked, “Whynot?” That is how the bold and bright andextraordinary ideas come about. Ted Nelsonand Marc Andressen [inventor of Mosaic andco-founder of Netscape] are two people whoasked, “Why not?” The Web is the result ofasking, “Why not?” Humility comes from fail-ing to and then seeing that you didn’t ask the“Why not?” question. That is when you say,“Yeah, I messed up big time.”


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Audience Member: Many leaders of theinformation economy seem to bemoan thefact that the Web and the Internet have notbecome the pervasive, ubiquitous appliancesthat they expected, or that it’s taking longerthan they expected. Do you think the obsta-cle is financial—that people can’t yet affordthe technology for it to become ubiquitous?Or is it the bandwidth? Or is it the lack ofreally useful stuff for people to do online?

Clement Mok: All of those things, butpatience is virtue. Adoption sometimestakes 10 years. Consider the penpoint oper-ating system; it actually started in 1990 or1991. Things take a bit of time.

But, indeed, a lack of useful, usable, anddesirable things on the Net is preventing itfrom being ubiquitous.

Jakob Nielsen: I agree. But I think thatthe cost is also an issue, because it is still tooexpensive—particularly overseas. On theother hand, that is the one thing we knowwill go away. If all other problems in societywere like that, we would be happy. Tenyears from now, the computer will cost 1percent of what it costs today. So, that prob-lem will go away.

A much more serious issue is not beingaddressed very well right now. Some of therecent data from Denmark says that person-al computers are now in 52 percent of allDanish households. That is only 3 percentmore households than 2 years ago. So, therehas only been a minuscule number of addi-tional households getting a PC. Sales are stillstrong, but that is because the same house-holds that already had a PC 2 years ago arebuying more. So, basically, the other half ofthe population are just not buying. It’s a mixof lack of motivation, because there is noth-ing for them there, along with a matter ofthings being too difficult for them. If youcompare the user interfaces of Windows 95and Windows 98, the incremental increasein usability might in fact be 3 percent. To getthe other half of the population to go on-line, these systems need to be more thanjust a little bit better—they have to be enor-mously better. That is what we are still wait-

Clement Mok: But broadband and manyother things are coming down the pipe verysoon. Hence, I think that dictum of 99 per-cent with regard to download time is irrele-vant.

Jakob Nielsen: But the download timeissue will always be with us, because it isbased on basic human characteristics. Theone-second response time rule says that any-thing slower than one second is going tofeel unpleasant, is going to feel sluggish.Even if you can say for sure that at somepoint in time we will have enough band-width to send a current Web page in a sec-ond, I’m sure some designers will find a wayof making it a fancier page that is slower todownload.

Eventually, you’ll be right, but that will bemore than 10 years from now.

Audience Member: I wonder if the windowof opportunity to fix the Web is closing. Iwonder if (a) people will so totally mistrustit, that all will abandon it, or (b) we’ll justaccept it, with the poor performance it has.After all, we all still shop in stores wherepeople are unhelpful and either wear fancysuits or white lab coats, and those storesseem to be doing quite well.

Jakob Nielsen: I don’t think it’s too late. Ireally believe we are still in the infancy ofthe Web, and it’s going to become muchbigger and much better. I really believe thatthe Web is the ultimate consumer empower-ment medium, because every single mouseclick is a vote for what’s good and what’sbad. That drives the traffic to a better Website, and the worse sites fade away a littlebit. I am very optimistic. As new things comeout, the better Web sites will bubble to thesurface, and the poor ones will fade away.

That is also why I think, by the way, thatthe current stock market valuations areproblematic. There is this notion thatwhomever is sitting on a good market sharenow will inevitably have good market sharein the future. But, there is very little loyaltyon the Web, and if something better comesalong, people are going to go there instead.

Jakob Nielsen

only a couple of years ago, there was no evi-dence that our 20 years of experience hadany impact at all on Web design. I’m won-dering if you have any hypothesis about whyno impact was made when the Web firststarted to take off, and about how we cando better in the next 10 years.

Jakob Nielsen: Usability has never been asuccess in computer companies, becausethey haven’t cared about customers. Theyhave been able to get away with that,because the customers let them get awaywith it. Because the people who buy thesoftware don’t really know or understandhow it is being used, and for lots of otherreasons, computer companies don’t need tomake usability their guiding criterion.

The Web is a little bit different. On theWeb, usability is becoming a guiding criteri-on for quite a number of companies. In thebeginning of the Web, this was not the case.At the beginning of the Web, everyone wasso excited: “Wow, I can put stuff up, andpeople in New Zealand can see it.” Theynever thought about how it was going to beused. There was a revolution just in the factthat you could put stuff up. That is probablywhy usability was downplayed in the veryearly years of the Web, and why wild exper-imentation, which was probably appropriatefor that stage of the Web, was up-played.People tried all kinds of odd things, most ofwhich didn’t work, but that was fine for thepioneering stage. We have now entered thestage of attending to the business criticalaspects of things, like whether you keepyour customers and whether people can findproducts. Usability is critical on e-commercesites, because if people can’t find the prod-ucts, they are not going to buy them. Youcan now tell that a large number of compa-nies are, in fact, making usability a verymajor, major issue in the management ofthe Web. Internet-only companies certainlyare, but so are some old-world companies.

Clement Mok: I want to add that the CHIcommunity was not part of that initial com-munity that was really developing anddoing things on the Net. So, much of what

ing for. There are certainly projects underway to make systems enormously better.But, right now, they are just too difficult touse.

Audience Member: You’ve talked abouthow to get people to agree when they arecollaborating, and about the trust issue, andabout banner ads and how we might getaway from them. I think it all comes down togetting better data. In the trenches, whenyou’re working with the ad sales people andthe producers and the designers and theengineers, and there is disagreement aboutwhat should be on the page and aboutwhere the ads should go, what do you do?There is such a paucity of information outthere right now. It’s very hard for me toargue to the sales people why we don’tneed the banner at the top or why we don’tneed the sponsorships on the side. Because Ihave no data to support my claims, theydon’t believe me. This is a call to action tothe community to do more studies, to iden-tify the things that will enable users to getwhat they want and advertisers to get whatthey want.

Jakob Nielsen: I agree. There is incrediblylittle research being done on how peopleuse the Web and why people use the Web.There is some amount of usability testingbeing done that affects individual designs,but there is not much generalization hap-pening. Yes, we need more. And I guess wedo need more data about what makesadvertising work well, even though I thinkbanner advertising on the Web is a doomedendeavor.

Audience Member: Though our field is a lit-tle over 20 years old at this point, I havebeen a little bit disappointed in how muchprogress we have made—in how muchimpact we’ve had on the computer industry.I would have hoped that by this time wewould have institutionalized usability aspart of software development, but I don’tthink we are anywhere near that.

My bigger disappointment is that whenthe Web really began to take off, which was


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from being some sort of nerdy specialty thata few people would gather to discuss at thiskind of conference, to being what makes anentire billion-dollar company live or die.That change in the importance of usability is100 percent due to the Web. The fact thatthe Web now makes your customer interfaceinto a user interface has so changed theimportance of this field that we can now gopick up all the research off the shelf and say,“Okay, we know how to do this; let’s go doit.” The people who do that will be worthbillions of dollars more than the people whodon’t.

Clement Mok: I think the Web has funda-mentally altered the fabric of how we evenlook at interaction. We have been siloed andhave been largely looking at applications.But the Web is a communication medium,and it’s an application, and it’s software, andit’s a distribution channel for your business.The Web has fundamentally altered our pro-cess of thinking about what we are all as acommunity trying to shape and create. So, Ithink it is all for the better.

you had learned was never transferred.Being a player, and being involved as a prac-titioner within that space, is important toachieving that transfer of knowledge. Thereis an amazing amount of catching up thatneeds to happen.

Richard Anderson: My final question isrelated to that. Has the onset of the Webadvanced the field of human–computerinteraction or set it back?

Jakob Nielsen: Very narrowly construed,it has set it back, because the design is nowlike design was for IBM mainframe termi-nals. That’s the type of design you get for alot of applications people are putting on theWeb. So, very narrowly construed, the Webhas set the field back dramatically.

But I think the Web has extended it,because it is now business-critical. That, Ithink, is the ultimate. We know a hugeamount of stuff about human–computerinteraction, but it’s just been sitting there inconference proceedings and not being used.Because of the Web, usability has changed

Human Limits to HCI: A Conversation with Bill Buxton and Clifford Nass

Cliff Nass is an associate professor of commu-

nication at Stanford University, with appoint-

ments in Symbolic Systems, Sociology, and

Science, Technology, and Society. In addition,

he is codirector of the Social Responses to

Communication Technology Project. His

areas of specialization are experimental studies

of social-psychological aspects of human–

computer interaction and statistics. He has

published extensively, including The Media

Equation: How People Treat Computers, Televi-

sion, and New Media Like Real People and

Places (Cambridge University Press), which he

authored with Byron Reeves.

Bill Buxton is a designer and researcher

specializing in human aspects of technology,

human–computer interaction, and technolo-

gy mediated collaborative work. He is chief

scientist at Alias | Wavefront Inc., as well as its

parent company, SGI, and is an associate pro-

fessor in the Department of Computer Sci-

ence at the University of Toronto. Bill is well

known to CHI conference attendees, having

presented some wonderful work at almost all

past CHI conferences, but a couple of CHI

conferences ago, he threatened to never

return. He appeared at CHI 99 from Japan

through the power of technology.

Richard Anderson: Bill, why did you tella CHI conference audience a couple of yearsago that you would probably not return?

Bill Buxton: While I didn’t necessarilymean it literally, I wanted to express my con-cern and disappointment with our disciplineand the state of HCI. When I look at thedesign of computers, for example, I see noth-ing since the introduction of the Xerox Starwhich shows much progress. And I question

Jakob Nielsen

Richard Anderson

and really look at that product and under-stand how many important and great ideasappeared in it, and, sadly, how few haveentered the interface community more gen-erally, and how many have entered withoutgiving credit to Bob.

Richard Anderson: Let’s talk about someof the underpinnings of that work. (I’d likeboth of you to talk about the kinds of thingsthat you want people to understand andattend to regarding human limitations, butlet me start with Cliff.) What is the SRCTmodel, Cliff? What is the “media equation?”

Cliff Nass: Fortunately, it’s one of thosethings that can be summarized in a sen-tence. In essence it says, “People’s interac-tion with computers, television, and othermedia is fundamentally social…and wemean “fundamentally” in the strongest pos-sible sense. One can take the theories ofhow people deal with other people andapply them to human–computer interaction,and also take the experimental methods andexperiments that are used to understandthese theories and apply those, as well, tounderstanding and testing human–comput-er interaction. By doing that, we discovermany, many new things we never wouldhave guessed were true—and also changeour focus to variables that might be impor-tant to regular people—variables such asfun and liking...things that tend to beabsent from CHI conference presentations.

Richard Anderson: Is it always true…dopeople respond to technology socially in allcases?

Cliff Nass: I think it’s most useful to thinkof the answer as “yes.” One of the reasonsthat the reception at CHI may have been alittle less warm than it otherwise might havebeen was that I believe that people shouldtry to state their theories in the strongestand most forceful possible terms. This does-n’t mean you believe them that strongly, butit means that you voice them that stronglyso that others can know when they agree ordisagree. So, I think the answer is “yes.” Fur-

the value of the research we’d been doing inthe community. If I piled up all the literaturethat has been published by the CHI commu-nity since the Star’s introduction, it would betaller than I am by far. Yet it has brought usnothing that’s gone significantly beyond theStar, and, significantly, the innovations repre-sented by the Star were accomplished with-out the benefit of such a body of research!So what does that say about the value ofwhat has followed? It is not that the researchwas a waste of time; it has told us a lot. Butin terms of helping consumers and affectingthe design of these things called computersthat we foist upon them…I would say thatwe’ve had very, very little effect. I find thislack of impact an interesting challenge, and Ialso find it a disappointment.

Richard Anderson: Cliff, as I recall, theCHI community didn’t exactly warmlyembrace you and your research not too longago…perhaps partly because of the associa-tion you had with the development ofMicrosoft Bob. I wonder if you could tell ussome of the reaction that you received earlyon?

Cliff Nass: I think one should separate thereception of the research program, whichcertainly wasn’t warm, from the receptionof Microsoft Bob, which also wasn’t warm!In the research program, we were trying todo something radically different—and try-ing to challenge a lot of the fundamentalideas lurking around CHI and the interfacecommunity (more generally). So, it wasn’tsurprising that it took a long time and studyafter study before people began to say,“Hey, there may be something here.” Andhappily now the work is more warmlyreceived. With Microsoft Bob, what hap-pened was really a hysteria towards thatproduct, which I think had more importantand unique interface insights than any oth-er product I’d seen in a long time…in fact,since the Xerox Star. Now there were prob-lems with it, as there often are with first-time products. But I think that now weshould calm down. It’s been over 5 yearssince Bob was released. It’s time to go back


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to be understood in order to execute socialaspects of user interface correctly?

Cliff Nass: Just about all aspects of humanbehavior…simple things such as politenessand flattery, and richer social rules such asbeing part of a team, feeling cooperative, allthe ways we induce cooperation, and all theways we induce trust…all the things thatmake us feel like we’re working together andwe’re being polite and we’re being pre-dictable (predictability is a fundamentalsocial response)…anything that makes us feellike this is a natural and social experience.

Richard Anderson: Give us an exampleof how tending to politeness could affectuser interface design?

Cliff Nass: That was actually the first studywe ever did—way, way back. It simplyinvolved people working with the computer,and then either the computer they workedwith or a different computer…asking, “Howwell did that first computer do?” Withhumans, we know what would happen. IfRichard asked me, “How do you like theinterview so far?” I’d obviously say, “great.”You in the audience would likely say “great”as well, but you might say less nice thingsthan I would. Because of the social demandswhen people ask questions about them-selves, they get more positive answers thanwhen others ask. When we did the samethings with computers, sure enough, peoplegave significantly more positive responses tothe computer that asked about itself.

Another important point is that theydenied this vehemently, even after beingshowed the data. They said, “Well, it obvi-ously applied to all those other computerscientists who didn’t know better; it couldn’tpossibly apply to me!” So that was a cluethat we were on to something, and we’veprobably done 40 or 50 experiments since.

The way that plays out in interfaces…mostinterfaces are remarkably impolite, not justin the Miss Manners sense, but in the senseof following the Gricean rules of politeinteraction and all the other rules of politeinteraction. We have interfaces that con-

thermore, I think that we learn a lot morewhen we make believe the answer is always“yes” and focus on those one or two timesin everyone’s life when we are able to thinkpast it.

Richard Anderson: What characteristicsof technology prompt social response?

Cliff Nass: That’s a great question, andthat’s actually something that we’re reallytrying to nail down. One of the most likelythings to do it is the use of language. I’m nottalking only about speech here, thoughspeech clearly ups the social ante. Even atext-based system that uses language isenough to generate social responses. Inter-action, cognizance of what happenedbefore, and reacting to thatcognizance…doing something social that’snormally done by a person…that seems tocue social responses. Things like voices, faces,and the other anthropomorphic features arealso relevant. It doesn’t take much at all.

Richard Anderson: Why do these charac-teristics cue social responses?

Cliff Nass: We think that the answer is anevolutionary one. The greatest opportuni-ties and the greatest problems a humanfaces are other people. Though not true ofall species, all our primary predators and ourprimary prey and our primary mating part-ners are all in the same species. Therefore,humans have evolved so that when they seeanything that even hints at being human,their brains immediately kick in and say, “Ahha, this is a person! And I will act as suchbecause there are so many advantages todoing so.” Our ancestors that didn’t do thatreally lost out. So we are living with an oldbrain that’s now confronted with newmedia that comes along and fools us andtricks us. But our brains are so powerfullydirected to those evolutionary fundamentalresponses of socialness that it’s almostimpossible to overcome.

Richard Anderson: What are some of theimportant social rules that you believe need

Clifford Nass

to have lower status; and there are some cas-es where we want it to seem to have equalstatus. For example, if you had a very com-plicated medical monitor, you wouldn’t wantit to sound highly submissive and tentative,saying, “Well, perhaps you need a little moreinsulin right now—maybe we should consid-er that.” Instead, you would want one thatseemed confident, dominant, and basically incharge. And if we sweared at it, it should say,“Don’t do that to me! I can swear at you, youcan’t swear at me.” There are other devices,other contexts, other roles, other situa-tions…in which we want a submissive inter-face. So, the answer is that the interfaceshould be consistent with the role that ishas—exactly as we admire those people mostwhose behavior and personality match theroles that they have.

Richard Anderson: MIT and IBM recentlyannounced plans to develop a computer’sability to detect users’ emotional states sothat it can respond more appropriately tousers. Do you think that these plans havepromise?

Cliff Nass: Yes. I think that there are real-ly two problems—both are important, butonly one of which is interesting to myselfand my lab. One is a very hard problem.How do you detect emotion? How do youidentify what a person’s emotion is? Theother problem is—what do you do about it?We recently proposed an interface that didone of three things. When it measured youremotions, it either said, “This computer hasdetected your emotion. It is such and such,and it will adapt to that emotion to makethe experience go better.” Or it said, “Thiscomputer has detected your emotion.” Or itsaid, “This computer has detected your emo-tion. It’s going to really impede your perfor-mance, so get with it and fix that!” Now, allthree of those responses can be really appro-priate in various contexts. Hence, the hardquestion (I think) is not, “How do you iden-tify people’s emotions?” but “What do youdo with them once you know them?” Again,I think the psychological literature hasanswers to those questions.

stantly violate politeness norms. Yet, we’resurprised when people don’t enjoy them,get angry at them, get frustrated, etc….

Richard Anderson: Why do so many peo-ple despise the dancing paper clip?

Cliff Nass: I was involved in the work onthe dancing paper clip, but I think they’reright to despise it for many reasons. The sin-gle best reason is a fundamentally socialone. When you ask people why they hatethat paper clip so much, one of the firstthings they say is, “Well, every time I write‘Dear Fred,’ the thing pops down and says,‘Oh, I see you’re writing a letter,’ and theydismiss it. The first time, it was okay, it washelpful. The second time, it was at least try-ing. But by the forty-seventh time, it wasclearly being at best passive aggressive andat worst down right hostile, implying that Icouldn’t make a decision about the rightthing to do.” Well, we know what we dowith people like that—we hate them. Infact, the first rule in the Dale Carnegiecourse of “How To Win Friends and Influ-ence People” is—remember things aboutpeople. The paper clip doesn’t do that. Also,it manifests a particular personality stylethat is not terribly popular; it’s a rather dom-inant, unfriendly personality type. Those aresome of the reasons.

Now with that said, there are characters inthere that lots and lots of people like—unfortunately, the interface was designed sothat you couldn’t discover them. But if yougo in and look for the other characters, theresearch shows that almost everyone finds acharacter that they like. Its lack of memory isstill annoying, and that’s a problem, butthere’s a range of characters in there; unfor-tunately, that was hidden in the interface.

Richard Anderson: When we swear at acomputer, should it swear back?

Cliff Nass: It depends on what you’re usingthe computer for. This is important. Thereare cases where we want the computer toseem to have high status relative to us; thereare some cases in which we want it to seem


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that is, what’s changed, they’re probablygoing to list the following: that they’resmaller, they’re faster, they’re cheaper,there’s more of them, they’re networked,they can sense location and motion, and soon, and finally, the input/output devices arechanging.

Now, I’m pretty sure that the answer that Iwould get from almost everybody in theaudience, or anybody they know, would beabout the same for the first few items on thelist—smaller, faster, cheaper, and more ofthem. However, when you get to the bottomof the list, things are going to be fuzzier. Thisis significant, since I believe that in terms ofdesign and where we’re going, my list wasgiven in inverse order of importance! That isto say, for anybody working in HCI, the mostimportant things are the input/outputdevices. The second most important thingsdeal with location and motion sensing. (AndI mean “location” in a social sense as well asa spatial sense, so I know my location relativeto this other device or in terms of this personor in terms of other things around me.) Thethird most important: the networking. Every-thing else is actually completely boring as aresearch topic to anybody in HCI, becausethere are millions of people working onsmaller, faster, cheaper, etc. That stuff isgoing to happen anyhow, so why waste yourtime on it?

As I said, of greatest importance are theinput/output devices. Coming back a littlebit to Clifford’s way of speaking, it’s aboutfirst impressions. It’s what you see, feel, andhear that shapes the core of your mentalmodel of the nature of the beast. When Igive lectures, I go around and ask people todraw quickly, in 15 seconds, a picture of acomputer. I have over 3,000 of these thingsin my filing cabinet, and over 80 percent ofthem don’t include a computer; instead,there is a CRT, a keyboard, and a mouse—the input/output devices. Those are thethings that shape the mental model. If I hadasked people to do the same thing in the‘60s, they would have drawn key-punchesand some other things; again, the computerwould have gotten left out.

That leads to a most powerful realization:

Richard Anderson: Bill, let me shift overto you. A lot, although certainly not all, ofyour work has been focused on inputdevices. Give us a brief overview of some ofthat work—but particularly its motivation.

Bill Buxton: This will be a bit of revisionisthistory, probably, since what I say today isprobably different than the story I wouldhave told you 20 years ago.

I believe in natural language systems, butI also believe that body language is part ofthat natural language. In our use of manualinput, primarily in interacting with comput-ers on the input side, we were basicallyhandicapped—literally with one hand tiedbehind our back for the most part, and with-out the use of all of our fingers except forone. Our ability to articulate using body lan-guage was just horribly restricted.

I’m a musician. I started out just trying tomake better musical instruments and tryingto make art with computers; that’s reallywhere my interest in input devices—and alot of the insights—originated.

As my experience grew, what I found wasthat it wasn’t just music systems thatneglected input. The same was true whetheryou’re doing a drawing, doing a spread-sheet, or anything else. Graphics got all ofthe attention—this is funny, because I workfor a computer graphics company. There wasa discrepancy between the bandwidth thatthe computer could use getting to me andwhat I could use to get to it, as well as therichness of the vocabulary that I could applyover the same bandwidth.

It always has struck me that if you wantedto make substantial change in user inter-face, first of all, change the devices, and sec-ond of all, focus on the input devices. Sixmonths of research and a couple thousanddollars focused on input will get you wayfurther ahead than 10 times that investmenton graphical output—just because of therelative stages of maturity. So, in my ownwork, I went where the weak spots were.Today, I’d give you a slightly differentanswer, and this ties in with some of whatClifford was talking about. Today, if you askpeople what’s going on with computers,

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pencil effectively. But what happens whenshe sits down in front of a computer? Shegets something that is unworthy of a grade-school child—because it’s a general-purposedevice—it’s a 15-dollar device. You needsomething to capture the skill of somebodywho has the skill of drawing. And the trans-ducer to capture the skill of an artist is very,very different than the transducer neededto capture the skill of a court reporter or ofsomebody operating a car.

My view is that very strong, specificdevices are how you make computers disap-pear, and how you change the computerfrom something that gets in the way into aprosthesis that helps empower us and actu-ally makes the world simpler.

There’s a very simple litmus test for me indesign. Does the design make the world eas-ier to navigate and function in, or morecomplicated? If it makes the world morecomplicated, it’s bad design.

Richard Anderson: Does the CHI commu-nity understand design?

Bill Buxton: The CHI community isn’t adesign community. That’s not an insult, bythe way;. There are lots of communities thataren’t design communities. I don’t believethat the CHI community is primarily con-cerned with design. This is manifest in manyways, such as in the very small interactionbetween the CHI community and, for exam-ple, IDSA [the Industrial Designers Society ofAmerica], which is concerned with oneaspect of design. It’s not a criticism. It’s anissue of not having found a way to worktogether.

Let’s look at priorities. If you talk to com-puter manufacturers, they’ll tell you thatthey can’t afford to spend more than a fewdollars on a mouse or a tablet or to manu-facture a keyboard. Yet, a good watercolorartist has a set of sable watercolor brushes,the collection of which costs more than thetotal cost of a Macintosh computer. The costof a single violin bow of a professional vio-linist—the bow alone, not the violin, just thebow—costs more than a Silicon Graphicsworkstation. Somebody who’s highly skilled

the most powerful thing shaping our mentalmodel is an accident of history and is, there-fore, a candidate for change. If I have agood sense of the mental model I want tocreate, in terms of the right model for theright person at the right time, by designingthe affordances of the I/O transducers, I canconjure that model up in the user’s mind.

In my view, the only good computer is aninvisible computer. So, if a user is consciousof interacting with a computer, it representsa failure of design. So, a lot of the issues thatClifford is talking about start to not onlychallenge our thinking, but also to provokequestions as we move into the family rela-tionships that we would see in ubiquitouscomputing and embedded computing—especially when you start thinking aboutforeground and background types of inter-action. Most of the social interaction thatClifford and Byron speak about is aroundthe foreground and not the background—which is actually one of the main areas forfuture change.

Richard Anderson: Let me follow upwith a related input device question. Youhave argued for a need for a collection ofstrong, specific devices, each best suited forlimited tasks. What do you mean by that?

Bill Buxton: In evolution, whether we’retalking about biology or almost anythingelse, strong, specific systems have typicallywon out over weak, general ones. I believethe same is true in user interfaces and inter-acting with computers. The notion of a gen-eral-purpose computer and general-purposeworkstation is simply an obsolete notion.

To sort of paraphrase some of what Clif-ford says—it’s extremely rude. The skills thatyou and I (and everyone else) have acquired,and on which we base our sense of self andour identity, are completely ignored. Oursystems, by their design and by their physicalmanifestation, are contemptuous of whatwe’ve spent our lives learning how to do.

People keep saying, “Why can’t computersbe as easy to use as a pencil?” Well, my wifewent to art college. She spent somethinglike 18 or 20 years learning how to use a


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There are lots more examples like thatthat are going to emerge. Things will evolve,but there’ll also be a lot of casualties alongthe way.

Richard Anderson: Cliff, I wonder if youwould like to respond to Bill’s commentabout Microsoft versus Apple.

Cliff Nass: Yeah. That was something thatwas, in fact, reported in the press. A coupleof reviewers thought it was an Apple prod-uct and said, “This is great, another break-through in design by Apple,” but when theyfound out it was by Microsoft, they sort ofreamed it.

A related notion is that it was a foray thatsaid, for one of the first times in computing,“This is not for people who love computers.This is for people who have tasks to getdone.” I think that the incredible reaction ofpeople in the computer community waspartly due to their feeling that they werebeing left out. In fact, we went back andlooked at the literature that came out whenautomatic transmissions first appeared, andyou read things like this: “Automatic trans-missions will allow anyone to drive. Insteadof needing to go to courses and understandhow the car really works, any ignorant per-son can get into a car and use it. In fact, evenwomen will be able to drive this new auto-mobile.” The extent to which that wasexactly much of the press on Bob wasremarkable. “Why, they think you can use acomputer without taking a course!”

Bill is exactly right—there is incredible val-ue in designs that meet a particular need forthe expert. But there is also incredible valuein designs that meet a need by working forpeople who want to know nothing aboutit…who don’t want to study for one minute.Both communities need to be helped, andBill’s idea of specialist devices actually helpsboth communities. But the primary ox thatwas gored with products like Bob was say-ing, “This isn’t a game that you guys whobuild computers can play in.” I think Applecould have pulled that off better thanMicrosoft, but it was a startling and upset-ting notion.

is willing to do whatever it takes to acquirethe technology that will be able to capturethe subtleties of nuance of gesture or ofwhatever, just to accommodate the skill thatthey’ve spent years and years acquiring. It’sthe contempt for that skill that’s manifest ingeneral-purpose devices, which are basicallyjacks-of-all-trades, masters-of-nothing. Thatfrustrates the hell out of me.

Richard Anderson: Will the day comewhen collections of strong, specific deviceswill be easy to obtain?

Bill Buxton: Absolutely. But, ironically,good design is a really thankless task,because if it’s really good design, you prob-ably don’t notice it in many cases…it just dis-appears into the ecology of your everydayworld. The things that don’t work are theones that shout out at you. So, failures dom-inate your perception, because successes justbecome invisible. We are starting to seestrong, specific devices coming out andworking very well. Though when I say verywell, it’s relatively speaking.

I felt sorry for Clifford and this wholething with “Bob,” and I’d like to use that asan analogy to talk about introducing newideas. First of all, I’m curious how Bob wouldhave been received in the press and otherplaces had it come from Apple rather thanMicrosoft. I think a lot of the negativity hadnothing to do with the design at all—it hadto do with where it came from. Regardless,why would we expect a new paradigm tohave been gotten right the first time or ear-ly on? One of the fairly successful newapproaches out there right now is the PalmPilot. But what’s interesting about that isthat everyone in the audience probably canmake a list of the companies that have gonebankrupt and failed in doing pen-basedPDAs. Yet, despite a litany of failures (oneafter the other), one came out that in manyways is indistinguishable from things avail-able 10 years ago. But Palm got a few littlesubtle details right that made all the differ-ence. It’s still a terrible device, but it meetsthreshold…it actually does what it’s sup-posed to do. And it will still get better.

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about the same level once they’re complete-ly obsolete, and at the same time, very fewof us will have spent time saying, “I’massuming that the graphical user interfaceand the Netscape browser and the CRT areobsolete. They’re not going to be aroundmuch longer. What’s next, and how does 3-D (and audio and gesture) fit into that newworld?”

Regarding some of Clifford’s notions aboutour relationships with computers—whathappens when the computer is actually justthe large whiteboard that I walk up to andthat looks like any other whiteboard? Willwe have the same kinds of relationships thathe and Byron talk about in their book whenI have a very strong, specific thing for teach-ing up on the wall that looks and feels justlike a whiteboard? I’m taking notes rightnow on my Cross pad—it’s just a pad ofpaper and my pen. How is my relationshipwith that machine different than the rela-tionship my great-grandfather had with apad of paper? When you break out of thebox and consider these other forms, the per-ceptions of the machines change, and thedevices change. And with these new percep-tions and the new tasks and contexts thatcome with them come opportunities toexploit things like 3-D and audio. So, it’s hardto talk about the representation withouttalking about the language or the messagesand the types of models that you’re trying tocommunicate with those representations.

Cliff Nass: I agree with Bill. But a warning:the problem with radically new things is thatthe first ones are usually atrocious. The firstmovies were atrocious. The first books wereboring and atrocious, though I suppose theBible doesn’t count. For the most part, whenwe try new things, our first attempts aremuch worse. Part of the lesson in Jakob’s “2-D versus 3-D” claim is that it’s a lot easier todo rotten 3-D than it is to do rotten 2-D. Andit’s a lot harder to do great 3-D.

The problem for a community that’s in aworld where things change rapidly is that ittends to become a very reactive community.When bold new interfaces appear, we imme-diately say, “Oh, it’s terrible because of this…I

Richard Anderson: Bill, some of yourother work has involved the use of 3-D inter-faces. Jakob Nielsen started one of his fairlyrecent Alert Box columns with the words,“2-D is better than 3-D, because people arenot frogs.” Is he correct?

Bill Buxton: Maybe if he lives in SouthPark. (audience laughter)

Richard Anderson: Is there a large rolefor 3-D on the Web?

Bill Buxton: There’s an assumptionembedded in your question as to what theWeb is. Do I think 3-D has a large place inthe Web, as we know it today? No, probablynot. The number of people that work withVRML [virtual reality markup language] andthe success there have not been particularlygreat. But the notion of Web browserstoday is totally boring and just not interest-ing to me at all.

When I think about 3-D and networks andsharing and so on, I think 3-D has a hugeplace. You know, it’s the old cliché: if theonly tool you have is a hammer, then you seethe world as a bunch of nails. If the only toolyou have is a Netscape or an Explorer brows-er, both of which are identical conceptually(going through a CRT and a keyboard and amouse), then you see things very differentlythan if you changed the nature of what thetransducer is. What you are doing wouldchange, the content would change, the loca-tion would change, the adjusters wouldchange, and the values of different externalrepresentations (visual representation of 3-D) would change as well. It’s the lack ofbreaking out of those constraints and thoseassumptions which is inhibiting to CHI.

Jakob writes provocative things, but thisprovokes me in the wrong direction. Thething that worries me to death is that if peo-ple listen to something like that, we’regoing to end up with a situation similar innature to the situation where we didn’tunderstand the line-oriented text editoruntil after it was obsolete and we were allinto graphical user interfaces. We’re goingto understand graphical user interfaces to


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or that Stravinsky had with his pens and thekind of paper and ink he used… clearly hehad an emotional relationship with them,which actually was consistent with the con-tent…so, form and content had consistency.Look at the relationship one has with a real-ly great car. These are clearly emotionalthings that go beyond what the whiteboarddid. Which begs a question: can we make awhiteboard that just begs you to come upand do algebra? (audience laughter)

Richard Anderson: Cliff, are we lookingat Bill’s picture as we would look at Bill if hewas actually up on the stage with us?

Cliff Nass: Well, I was thinking about that.Bill has the advantage of being much morehandsome than I am, and he has chosen aparticularly good picture of himself, and I’mstuck with what I have! On the other hand,and on the cheerier side for me, a study onsynchronized speech done by Byron Reevesand Dave Voelker says that the fact that mylips move while I talk gives me an edge overBill in that you think that I’m more honestand more intelligent. His words sort of winthe day for him anyway! (audience laughter)

Bill Buxton: I’m not even going to touchthat one!

Richard Anderson: Bill, who has influ-enced your work and your perspective agreat deal? Who are the people you havegreatly admired?

Bill Buxton: There have been a few peo-ple. My interest in user interface design wasgreatly influenced by Ron Baecker, one ofmy first mentors; I probably learned morefrom him about user interface design thananybody I’ve ever met. And there are somegreat people I worked with at Xerox PARC.But I’m going to actually step out of the CHIcommunity—not to ignore those people,but because they’re obvious, since I citethem in the literature.

One of the most influential people interms of input devices was a guy namedHugh Lacain, who, with Bob Moog and Don

don’t have to study it any more. I don’t haveto try to draw understanding out of it.” So,the depressing notion is that as these boldideas appear, the first ones aren’t going to beas convenient to use as a Netscape or InternetExplorer browser. Therefore, the communitytends to ignore them as opposed to lookingfor the big ideas.

As far as what happens when whiteboardsbecome computerized…it’s a lot like whathappens with people in low-level serviceindustries in the United States. They becomerelatively invisible, because the jobs they dodon’t require us to have a rich social interac-tion with them. A whiteboard that just takesinformation is like someone to whom yousay, “please pick up this book for me.” Theperson goes and gets it and brings it back,and you may say, “thank you” thoughtlessly,but there’s no social interaction there. It’swhen the thing has speech or some othermodality that cues social responses—thenit’s not just a whiteboard. So whether thingsare psychologically present or invisible issomething that we navigate in the social-to-social realm as well as in the social-to-tech-nology realm.

Bill Buxton: In your book, you talkedabout arousal. The measure of maturitymight be when the thing that arouses mewhen I’m working with a whiteboard iswhat I wrote on the whiteboard rather thanthe whiteboard itself.

Cliff Nass: Yeah, I think that when tech-nologies mature, they’re either radicallysocial or radically invisible. That’s very muchlike the roles we have in society. I think themiddle ground of where technologies gofrom foreground to background just isn’t asustainable model in the long run. There willbe highly foreground technologies, and therewill be highly background technologies.

Bill Buxton: Actually, I’ll buy into that.Let’s take the case where we push things tothe extreme. Whiteboards aren’t finely craft-ed musical instruments. If you look at therelationships that watercolor artists havewith their favorite sable watercolor brushes

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every user?” I think the answer is “yes”—realizing that your theories may berevised… that you may find the third diaryor the new experiment. I think that was avery important lesson.

As for the second… When I started thisresearch program, not only the CHI commu-nity, but also my own colleagues, thought Iwas a crackpot and urged me to do some-thing else (I was going up for tenure at thetime) and said, “This area is insane.” But Ipersisted, and experiment after experimentdidn’t work, and my graduate students allleft me, except for one loyal student,Jonathan Steuer. I was so miserable that Iwent off on a hike with my wife, BarbaraLevitt, and said, “Well, I’ll just clear my headand hike away.” And so I hiked, and all of asudden, it started to rain, in June, which isimpossible in California. So, it was clearlyonly raining on me. And this was clearly thebathetic metaphor for my life, and I wasabout to throw in the towel when my wifesaid, “Why don’t you just do an experimentyou’re sure is going to work?” And that oneworked and led me to lots of others thatworked.. So, she was a very big influence.

And the third… When I first encounteredthe literature in computer science aboutcomputer–human interaction, there was thisremarkable arrogance of, “This is what nor-mal people do, and this is what we comput-er scientists, who are deep and thoughtful inunderstanding the distinctions betweencomputers and humans, do.” And, “Oh,those pathetic people—one day we’ll curethem and train them and make them takeclasses, and they’ll be okay.” This rubbed methe wrong way. This was a type of arrogancethat seemed really suspicious. I was trainedas a sociologist, so comments like that, thatwe’re different than them, always raisedhackles. So, I really wanted to set out to findsimilarities among people, and things thatwere education- and arrogance-indepen-dent. So, much of my work tends to look atthings that are the same whether you knowwhat you’re doing or not.

That was the third influence, but I will saythat that has really changed. To the credit ofthis community, this standing apart between

Buchla (both of whom I respect hugely), wasbuilding electronic musical instruments inthe late ‘60s that I had the privilege to useand to work with. He may have been thefirst person I met who was a luthier—aninstrument builder.

A lot of the people who have impressedme are crafts people who have an incredibleability to execute a detail in making beauti-ful things that are functional as well. I keepcoming back to this notion of tools forartists, partly because I started out makingmusical instruments—electronic musicalinstruments. So influential has been the factthat with a beautiful violin or watercolorbrush or similar device…you want to touchit, it begs to be touched. And the momentyou touch it, you don’t even have to play anote—it reflects the respect for your skill andyour hard work that the builder…the luthi-er…embedded in the device itself. It’s peoplelike that who have most stimulated me.

Also, a number of musicians who I workedwith early on stimulated me and triggeredme. When you design something…whenyou’re the propellerhead who designed thesilly thing, and you know everything aboutit, supposedly, and then you hand the thingoff to a musician, and they do things withyour instrument or device that you neverimagined was possible…in terms of stimu-lating respect and challenging you to go onfurther…that type of experience had astrong influence on me. I was very lucky, ear-ly on, to be exposed to that.

Richard Anderson: Cliff, same question.

Cliff Nass: There were three who I canidentify. The first was my dissertation advis-er, Jim Vandiger, who once said to me, “Dothe best you can with the data you got.Don’t try to really answer the question.”And he said, “Remember that the history ofthe 13th century is based on two diaries, andwhen they find the third one, there’s goingto be a very different history of the 13thcentury, but we shouldn’t stop historians.”That really made me think, “Could you dothese experiments—try to capture basicnotions, not test every product, not ask


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Bill Buxton: I’d like to give a concreteexample that’s consistent with this, an exam-ple that comes from some of the researchthat we did at the University of Toronto withthe Ontario Telepresence Project. The under-lying principle is that if we know the biasesor the type of behavior that we want toevoke, then we can design the biasesthrough the affordances of the devices sothat that’s the behavior you get. And one ofthe strongest biases on our behaviors is thebias of the path of least resistance.

We used to have these desktop video con-ferencing units that you could use to entereach other’s room to talk (this is stuff thatgrew out of work at Xerox PARC and XeroxEUROPARC). When Hiroshi Ishii spent timewith us, he never used the system. He wouldalways walk down to my office, which wastwo floors downstairs. I finally said, “Why?”and he said, “Well, because it feels rude tojust jump onto your desk. There’s no way toapproach.” (Marilyn Mantei has talked a lotabout this notion of “approach.”) So, I hunga small monitor, camera, and speaker abovethe door, far away, which I could hardly see(but I could make things out), and the setupgave a very wide-angled distant view of justme and my desk. And I could also hear peo-ple when they would appear there. Thevideo circuit was placed in a location appro-priate to the social function of standing atthe door to see if they could come in, andbecause of its distance from me, it degradedmy ability to see the person. It also degrad-ed their ability to see me in detail, but itenhanced their ability to see global context.If it was OK for them to move in, then theycould move up to the desk where they got avery different type of view. So now therewas a transition, and each location had a dif-ferent set of affordances that were appro-priate for the type of social interactions thatwould take place if there was a live personthere.

By adding more technology to the room,but the right technology in the right placefor the right function, the apparent technol-ogy and intrusiveness of the technologywere greatly reduced; it didn’t interfere, butthere was much more technology there. And

people who are computer literate and com-puter knowledgeable, and those who arenot, is no longer one of contempt or patron-ization. So, I suppose that if I entered thefield today, I wouldn’t have that third inspi-ration.

Richard Anderson: Bill has stressed theimportance of making technology disappearin order to minimize its interference onhuman-to-human communication. Can thetechnology be designed so that the interfer-ing role that it plays be played in accordancewith social rules—perhaps making it a bene-ficial participant in the interaction?

Cliff Nass: Yeah. I always look for humanexamples that are similar, and a human anal-ogy is the superb translator. When you go toa foreign country to give a speech, and youhave a translator, somehow the translator(though doing something quite disturbingand traumatic . . . changing your words andin some sense owning those words) canbecome invisible. The best ones becomeinvisible; they become a mere “conduit.”And as Bill said, the unfortunate part is thatthey lose all credit for the remarkable workthey are doing, because good design doesget invisible.

So, there are certainly ways to do it, andmuch to learn from humans. How do butlersbecome invisible? How do messengersbecome invisible? The issue is to think about,“What would we want a person to do tofacilitate this interaction?” Sometimes it’s,“go away,” such as when you get fixed up ona blind date, where instead of just being toldto appear at a place, you’re brought tosomeone’s house for dinner. How does thatperson gracefully start vanishing into thebackground to enable successful interaction?The person doesn’t keep on popping up andsaying, “Hi! Remember I’m going to facili-tate this social interaction.” Instead, the per-son starts things off, then smoothes the waythrough various clever tricks. Those are thetypes of skills that technologies can havethat will facilitate interaction. But again, asBill noted, the designers of those systemswon’t get the credit they deserve.

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meaningful. By the way, when I talk about the novice-

to-expert transition, I don’t mean novice toexpert as an artist or as an animator or as anaccountant—I’m assuming you’re an expertthere. I’m talking about your ability to uti-lize the tools.

The term “user friendly” is a marketingslogan which I stay away from—just becauseit’s become meaningless. Things in our lives,whether they be buttons, shoelaces, saxo-phones, pianos, guitars, or automobiles…none of those things are “easy touse”…none of those things meet Ted Nel-son’s “10-minute rule,” which claims thatyou should be able to be functioning andworking in 10 minutes. Ted is a charmingguy and is entertaining, but that’s a stupidstatement to make about tools (if, in fact, heever really made it). If you believed that userfriendly was important, all the things I justlisted, like the violin, the piano, and the car,would be obsolete, because they aren’t userfriendly in the sense that you can just walkup and use them. Yet, that’s what most peo-ple mean when they talk about user-friend-ly computers.

When making the transition betweennovice and expert…should there be asmooth curve? Should there be a gradualtransition? Should what I do in 30 stages ofproblem solving be developed and rein-forced to help me later in the expert stage?Absolutely! And should I be swearing thatwhole time? Absolutely not! So, in thatsense, yes, they should have a degree ofpoliteness and civility. But I would never usethe term “user friendly” any time, any place,except to rant about how much I don’t likethe term.

Cliff Nass: I agree with Bill. In fact, thereare things for which your friend is not theright person to teach you. Some of my great-est teachers were not and never could be myfriends; in fact, there were domains in whichtheir harshness and ruthlessness reallyhelped me to achieve my goal, which was tobecome expert in those domains.

So, is the goal to instantly make peoplehappy (which is a perfectly fine goal)? Or is

each of the pieces was bad at some things,just as each was good at other things. Thedesign grew straight out of the social oranthropological analysis of the architecturalspace and the social functions that appear atdifferent locations in that space.

I got really excited when I read The MediaEquation, because I wasn’t familiar with thatwork. Clifford and Byron were taking adescriptive approach to things rather thansaying, “This might be relevant to design.”We had sort of stumbled onto this stuff. Wedidn’t have any of the theory behind it, butwe were applying it to design. So, my read-ing of Clifford’s book sort of said, “Yes,that’s why it worked; that can explain whatwe did.” It was like finding the other half tosomething we’d been struggling with formore than 6 years.

Richard Anderson: Bill, you have oftenargued that it is appropriate to designthings to accelerate and encourage the tran-sition from being a novice to being anexpert, instead of designing something tobe user friendly.

Bill Buxton: Yeah.

Richard Anderson: Might Cliff’s worksuggest that things need to be user friendlywhile guiding the growth of expertise?

Bill Buxton: This is funny, because we justhad a big argument about this today. Wereyou eavesdropping?

My concerns about the notion of userfriendly have to do with the question of,“What the hell does ‘user friendly’ mean?” Ifyou take a sociologist’s perspective or abehavioral psychologist’s perspective, youmight be able to quantify it and measure it.I talk about enhancing the ability to makethe transition from problem solving behav-ior to skilled behavior—novice to expert,because I know what those things meanquantitatively…I know how to measurethose things (well, actually, I don’t, but I’mlucky to work with smart people who do).But we know how to measure this stuff, andwe can actually make specifications. And it’s


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than when I was at Xerox PARC or at theUniversity of Toronto. The strategies and theapproaches are very, very different. One ofthe reasons I made the transition to thecompany I am now at is because I wanted tounderstand both sides. Technology trans-fer—for things to get out from the timethey’re known to the time they’re in thepublic—continues to take 15 years. I’d like toreduce that to about 7 years.

I also want to find out how to have theskill of user interface design understood sothat people will respect it in the same waythat they respect the skill of hacking anoperating system or designing a micropro-cessor. Since the skill of design is not wellunderstood, everybody is an expert, andthey all have an equal vote. There’s no oth-er discipline that I’m aware of where every-body has an equal vote, regardless of theirskill or expertise. So, one of the ingredientsthat will bring us to better design withincompanies and other organizations is get-ting to the essence of what the core ele-ments of design are that we have to put intoplace…in terms of the organizational struc-ture of our teams and so on.

Graphics design is really important, and alot of people work on the visuals, but very,very few people work on interaction. Thefeel…the actual aesthetic of the gestures(the connectivity and the body language inthat), and the dynamics of interaction, andthe timing and the tempo, and the fluidity,… this is the most neglected part…this is thearea in which we have the fewest peoplewho are literate. Therefore, we have thesejerky, disconnected sentences in the bodylanguage of our interactions with comput-ers.

Cliff Nass: I work very closely with a com-pany, Netsage, that says, “To do design, youneed social scientists, artists, and technolo-gists.” I think that’s a pretty good formula. I want to emphasize a point that Bill made.There’s been this idea that somehow designis this richly democratic process where we alllisten to each other, we’re all expert, we alltake each other seriously. I don’t think thatis fully true. I think a better model is that we

the goal to get people to use a particulartool successfully so that in the long run theywill be happy? Long-run happiness andshort-run happiness are often competitive,and neither one is always the right thing todo. I don’t know of any expert in any areawho says, “Gee, the reason I’m an expert isbecause everything was so easy and every-one was just so supportive.” Sometimes youneed pushing. My graduate students tell meI err perhaps too much that way. Nonethe-less, it’s not always the right thing to try tobe nice. The nicest thing you can do forsomeone is to help them meet their goals.Different people do that in different ways,because of individual differences andbecause different situations require differ-ent techniques.

And learning things in 10 minutes… Idon’t actually think Ted meant that. Ted saysmany things he doesn’t mean, and I thinkthat was one of them.

Bill Buxton: Unlike us, right? (laughing)

Cliff Nass: Right! We stand by what wesay, Bill! (laughing)

Richard Anderson: Yesterday, ClementMok and Jacob Nielsen argued for a needfor information designers, brand strategists,user researchers, software engineers, and allsorts of other disciplines on a Web designproject. I’m interested in learning what dis-ciplines the two of you emphasize the needfor.

Bill Buxton: I can’t answer that questionwithout qualifying it. Am I at a university?Am I at a research lab? Or am I actuallybuilding and designing products for peoplewho are trying to do serious things (and artis serious, by the way)? Am I trying to maketools that ensure that the people who workfor my company will still have a job tomor-row and ensure that the artists who use thetechnology (in our case, the animation sys-tems) have the best tools available? Where Iwork today, the reality of trying to do gooddesign and get innovation and new con-cepts into products is very, very different

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problem. How do you do good design andget great user interfaces with economicalteams? That seems to be a really importantchallenge. And it’s a challenge which is allthe more pronounced when we’re still in anera where 95-plus percent of the computerscience graduates in the world today stillgraduate without ever having written a pro-gram that was used by another humanbeing, much less being marked on their abil-ity to do so.

Richard Anderson: Why is it difficult forpeople to trust the expertise of another?

Cliff Nass: The problem has been thatproblems in computer science have histori-cally been defined as technology problems.As the technologies become simpler andmore accessible…so that you can use com-plicated programs without being a pro-grammer, trust becomes equalized. In thedays when the only people who could readwere the priests (who were literate), nobodyelse had much say about anything. Theycould claim a monopoly on knowledge thatwas hard to challenge, because they claimeda particular skill that was so compelling andso unique, that it implied knowledge of allother things. In some sense, that’s been thehistory of the field of human–computerinteraction.

As computers get cheaper, easier, andfaster, and software gets easier to use, nogroup can claim the core competency fromwhich all power derives. As that happens,the social things will work themselvesout…namely if no one can claim a core andcritical position over all others, then theycan’t claim core competence in all areas.That’s a very common sociological phe-nomenon. So, as more people can use thisstuff and the priesthood breaks down. you’llstart seeing a lot more trust and coopera-tion.

The early days of film weren’t as cheeryand remarkable as now. The cameraman,especially the person who could build andfix the camera, had an enormous amount ofpower and would often co-opt that intoareas, such as directing, in which they might

figure out who knows the most about anarea and listen to them most closely. Theartist should listen to the social scientistsabout social science and to the technologistsabout technology…be informed about thetrue constraints and the opportunities. Butthe artists have to be trusted to do art; socialscientists and technologists shouldn’t bedoing art. Nor should artists be doing tech-nology. Since it’s really hard to be good atone of these things…let alone two or eventhree…I think that division of labor makessense. This idea of participatory design is agood one, but not when it means the abdi-cation of expertise.

I was once teaching a class at Stanford,which often has these democratic impulses,and I said, “I can’t remember who said thisparticular quotation: A or B.” One of the stu-dents raised their hand and said; “Well, letstake a vote on it!” That idea about votingabout facts…about voting about what’strue, while it is charming and feels good,doesn’t result in the best designs. You haveto trust people at what they’re really good atand interject stuff that you’re really good at.

Bill Buxton: I’ve spent quite a bit of timein my current job around filmmakers. Film-making is clearly a highly collaborate skillinvolving tons of people with lots of differ-ent skills, but the fact is that there is onedirector…one who has final say. The way wedo a lot of user interface design is thateverybody on the executive team has anequal vote. If we made films that way, filmswould be like our user interfaces, and peo-ple wouldn’t line up for a month to watchthem!

I wish I could just wave a magic wand andsay, “Here’s how to do it.” But when you’reactually trying to build a commercial system,it’s rare that you have the luxury of havingthat full suite of talents that Clifford and Isort of enumerated. And we left outsome…we left out the usability testing peo-ple and the QA people and even others. Allof a sudden you have such a huge team thatyou will never get a product to market,because either the team is too big to func-tion or you simply can’t afford it. That’s the


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that are wrong—that are too simplistic. Forexample, at a workshop of yours that Iattended some time ago, you argued thatpeople should be focusing on interactiveperceptualization instead of scientific visual-ization. Also on multisensory instead of mul-timedia. What concepts are people focusingon now that are too simplistic, and whatshould they be focusing on instead?

Bill Buxton: I think that there are a num-ber of things. We’re overly simplistic aboutour view of how the Internet and puttingcomputers in the classroom are going to rev-olutionize education. And I still question, interms of epistemology, whether we knowanything more than we did before that canbe applied to the technology. For example,do we understand the difference between awhiteboard and a slate?

The fundamental problems are not tech-nological in almost any domain in whichwe’re trying to apply technology. The tech-no-centric view, as opposed to a human-cen-tric view, is most simplistic thing. I thinkalways of the technology as a prosthesis—whether it be a physical prosthesis or a cog-nitive prosthesis or a sensory prosthesis. Tobuild a prosthesis, you need to know andhave a theory of the function of the task it isintended to support. Then you can design itsaffordances in accordance with that model.We often cannot articulate the model that’sunderlying our designs, because we just dothe design without the model. If I want tomake a system for drawing, I had betterunderstand drawing, not computers.

Richard Anderson: You’ve also arguedthat we lack respect for human capability;indeed, you’ve stressed this already today.What human capability do we lack respectfor that results in our lack of respect forhuman capability? Or to put it a little differ-ently, what human capability do we lackrespect for that makes it difficult to correctour lack of respect for human capability?

Bill Buxton: It’s interesting…you can go toany bookstore and see walls of self-helpbooks about finding your inner self. I some-

not have any competence. Eventually, cam-eras got so reliable, so easy to use, thatthose guys eventually lost their status or thebest ones retained their status for that par-ticular role. So, I think it’s a matter of thetechnology becoming stable enough for thepriesthoods to vanish.

Bill Buxton: I think there’s an additionalissue. You need to know something aboutsomething before you know what you don’tknow. When you have a product to designor something you’re trying to build and getinto the hands of the ultimate user, youwant to move…you want to be efficient.What you’re trying to do is the equivalent oftrying to do mathematics, and it’s difficult todo mathematics if you have to explain arith-metic all the way along. It’s the people whoaren’t even literate with the basic opera-tions of arithmetic who believe that theyknow as much about math as you do.

I don’t want to sound like an elitist, buteducation helps you build discrimination.You start to see differences that weren’tthere before. We know this about the histo-ry of photography in terms of resolution.We know that when Fisher played the firststereo, everybody said it sounded exactlylike an orchestra, and we said the samething about CDs. As we got more expertiseand granularity, we started to realize thatthey don’t sound exactly like an orchestra.Think of the paintings you saw in an art his-tory course that made you say, “I could havedone that.” As you start to get some litera-cy, you realize, “No, I couldn’t have.” Thepoint is that there is a basic literacy that hasto be achieved before you start to see someof the finer granularity to how to make deci-sions and to why to think this way or thatway. The basic assumptions that we need toall share so we can get on with the job arenot there right now…they are there in moremature areas. But even art still suffers fromthis problem, so we shouldn’t feel picked on.We should just recognize the phenomenonand start to figure what to do about it.

Richard Anderson: Bill, you have talkedabout how people often focus on concepts

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systems. The more specific the device, themore I know about what it is, who’s going touse it, context, and so on; therefore, themore appropriate the response can be. So, Iwould argue that your father’s computer isgoing to be a different computer than yourchild’s computer versus your boss’s comput-er, because they will be distinguishable bythe physical and social context in which theyappear and where they are used and thebehaviors that will be embodied.

The biggest problem with computerstoday is that they all have personality disor-ders—they would all have to be on Prozac ifthey were human beings. One minute I’m aword processor, the next minute I’m killingpeople in a game, the next minute I’m in e-mail, and the next minute I’m sitting therefor erotic pleasure—what am I? If you lookat strong, specific devices such as a personalcomputer which we commonly call a cam-era…it knows that it is a camera; it knowsit’s not a word processor; it behaves like acamera; it knows that its function is to havelight in and chemistry out, or light in andpixels out; therefore, it behaves appropri-ately for its form and function and location.It doesn’t have so much ambiguity, and themore I can let it know what it is.

Look at a flatbed scanner. A flatbed scan-ner has a personality disorder—it doesn’tknow what the hell it is. But if you look atthe physical affordances, what the hell is itfor if it’s not for scanning flat documents?Yet, it doesn’t know that it’s for that, and itdoesn’t know anything about flat docu-ments. And when you put a document on it,it can’t say, “Hey, you’re a color image—I’lldo you in 24 bits,” or “You’re a grayscale—I’lldo you in 8 bits,” or “You’re line art, so I’ll doyou in 1 bit,” and things like that. It can havethis kind of knowledge and take advantageof it. Xerox did some really interesting workon this for a product that shipped for awhile,but it hasn’t come into the mainstream. Assoon as we start having devices that knowwhat they are, you will behave with themdifferently—in exactly the same way, I wouldargue, that you differently behave with thefamily and the other people in your socialnetwork that you enumerated.

times wonder whether this is rooted in thefact that a lot of us just aren’t aware howwe derive our sense of self, and what we’reproud of, and our identity. In many cases, ithas to do with the things that differentiateus from other people. Those are the thingsthat we work hard at, because usually thosedifferentiators are things we have had towork hard at. We probably have had someaptitude that we worked hard at, whether itbe the kid who’s the best math, the kidwho’s the best at music, the one who has thebest calligraphy, the fastest runner, and soforth. If we start to understand that this iswhat’s important to me… this is my sense ofself and identity… and that everyone elsehas something like that, then the best thingthat I can do as a designer is design thingsthat amplify that, rather than ignore it anddenigrate it—and as a result we’re going toget great design. If many of us don’t seewhat it is in ourselves that’s important, thenhow are we going to take into considerationwhat is important in others in ourdesigns…so that our designs amplifies whatis important in other peoples. If we don’t seeit in ourselves, how are we going to see it inother people? Again, it’s not a technologicalissue; it’s just a question of what makes uswhat we are. (audience applause)

Audience Member: A social perspective ofinteraction would suggest that peoplerespond as they respond to people. Irespond and interact with my mother verydifferently than how I interact with mydaughter. With my daughter, I “emote” a lotmore; I’m very accentuating/emotional.With my boss, I’m very reserved. I differenti-ate, and I treat people as individuals, andI’m successful, because I can do that. I’mtrusted, because I can do that. Do interfacesneed to be able to differentiate, know theindividual, and adapt accordingly or do theyneed to continue to just seek the successfulcentral tendencies and serve the mass popu-lations?

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sole purpose is to take a measure of yourarousal. Again, it is exactly what Clifford andByron talk about in their book.

And they’re useless for word processing!(audience laughter)

Audience Member: Within industrial design,design is a process whereby function andform get defined. I wonder to what extentyou people feel that we are taking advan-tage of this model. To what extent shouldwe be addressing the functionality andinterface issues at the same time…in otherwords, dealing with usefulness at the sametime and usability?

Bill Buxton: I think that both the CHI com-munity and the industrial design communityneed to extend their design briefs in eachother’s directions. The industrial design usu-ally stops when you get to the glass; indus-trial designers work in front of the glass, notbehind it. They don’t typically design thefonts or the icons—they’re working onthings like the box. Yes, I know there areexceptions, so don’t beat me up.

Fifteen years ago, a lot of people doinguser interface design and designing comput-ers actually took it upon themselves tochange the physical nature of the box,because they understood that it had an effecton performance. That is, to a large extent,one of the lost arts. A limitation that I nowsee in a lot of CHI research is that we take apriori and accept the fact that there is a key-board, a mouse, a CRT or an LCD, and a GUItype of interface, and use that as the point ofdeparture and just try to refine that. Now,any industrial designer would say, “No, no,no, let’s truly take this notion of form andfunction and have consistency from thedesign of the fonts right through to thedesign of the box (for the function of what-ever it might be), and let’s not have any ofthose things a priori. Both sides could try toflow a bit into those opposites and just worka lot more together, but typically they’re edu-cated at completely different institutions.

Cliff Nass: Well, I think that there aretimes when you want to accentuate form

Cliff Nass: The irony of that is that thoseclearly defined devices that have a clear role,a clear point of view, clear orientation, …are in one sense easier to design for, becauseof the positive feedback that it ensues. If Ihave a clearly defined device, such as a cam-era that works like a camera in all the wayscameras should work and does all the logicalthings, not only will you as a user find it eas-ier to use, but I’ll be better able to predictwhat you’re going to do. Therefore, I canfurther optimize, because I will not onlyknow what the initial state is, I’ll know theprogression of that interaction.

This is true in voice systems as well. We’vebeen doing studies on things like using aparticular voice type to elicit certain voicecharacteristics. If you have, let’s say, a highlyaccented voice speaking to you in a speechrecognizer, we know the types of speechpatterns you’ll use. We know you’ll hyperar-ticulate. We know you’ll speak louder,because we all speak louder when we speakwith people who we don’t think understandus. Plus, I can leverage that to tune the rec-ognizer to those particular characteristics.By knowing what’s going on, you not onlycan make the user happier, you also get to,in some sense, positively manipulate theuser into doing things that you can then fur-ther optimize to and therefore furthermanipulate the user. It’s why we can carry onconversations without thinking very hard.It’s because there are a lot of basic patternsthat we execute quite well.

Bill Buxton: Let me give you an examplethat goes even deeper than that. BMW anda couple of trucking companies have beendeveloping what is essentially a video cam-era with a microprocessor that fits in thedashboard of your car and watches you. Thesole purpose of this computer is to get asense of how tired you are, because it actu-ally understands the behavior of your eyes,eyelids, and your glancing in order to alertyou if you start to fall asleep at the wheel.Here’s a case where a very strong, special-ized computational device will be embed-ded in automobiles that basically can be thedifference between life and death. Their

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tion.” Fifty percent of what we do should beto go back and look at and learn from his-torical precedents and at what’s gone on inthe past. The problem is that we think wehave to be original—that’s how we showhow clever we are. We have to invent thingsfrom scratch rather than do scholarship anddo research and synthesize.

Right now, for example, everybody is try-ing to do the uni-stroke alphabets on penbased PDAs. In the process of writing abook that I’ve almost finished, I was work-ing on the chapter on pen-based stuff. I justwent to the library, did my homework, andlo and behold, it turns out that the basics ofGraffiti—about 30 percent of the alpha-bet—were invented in 63 BC by a slave ofCicero named Marcus Tullius. His shorthand,notee Tironianae, was used for 1,000 yearsand was used to record the minutes of theRoman Senate.

What I’m really trying to say is that a lotof the ideas…a lot of the concepts…are outthere, and we tend to think that there’ssome magic bullet as opposed to the stan-dard, old, traditional things of a combina-tion of research, scholarship, and invention.And that’s us, that’s not the technology. Thetools are there to do what needs to bedone, and there’s no excuse except our-selves.

Cliff Nass: I’d add patience to that, whichis something I alluded to earlier…the toler-ance for designs that are worse overall anddon’t work as well, but might have aninsight embedded in them. We’re so con-cerned with just making things better over-all, whatever better means, that we tend toignore those things that do one thing welland lots of other things lousy. Learning fromthings that seem to be failures, learningfrom things that in many ways aren’t anybetter and are in some ways worse, wouldbe a good lesson.

Bill Buxton: We should have a quota atCHI that 25 percent of the papers have to bedescribing failures and why they failed.

Cliff Nass: Absolutely.

over function. I think Bill is right…thatthinking literally out of the box, or thinkingwith the box—not just accepting the screen“as is,” is a great idea. But, even if you wereto do that, there are trade-offs betweenform and function that become interesting.Frank Lloyd Wright houses, for example, aregreat for form and function, but Frank LloydWright furniture is impossible to sit in. Thefurniture is quite beautiful, and that’sbecause he figured people wouldn’t be sit-ting very much in his houses. So, we canthink about when should we worry aboutthe form aspects as opposed to the functionaspects, or put better, think of form as mak-ing beautiful things function—form being inservice of a particular function, namely,making people feel good.

Bill Buxton: The Macintosh came out in1983; it’s now 1999. Don’t you find itremarkable that at the end of the millenni-um, the hottest, most progressive, imagina-tive thing that’s happened is that iMac hascolored boxes?

Cliff Nass: But they’re translucent, Bill!

Bill Buxton: …and they’re translucent…but otherwise, from 10 feet away, they’recompletely indistinguishable from anythingthat existed in 1982. And that’s consideredprogress and ground-breaking industrialdesign—give me a break! (audienceapplause)

Cliff Nass: You’re getting wild applause,Bill!

Richard Anderson: My final question toboth of you is the final question listed in thedescription of this session that appeared inthe advance program. What is keeping usfrom achieving greater benefit from tech-nology?

Bill Buxton: Ourselves. It’s not the tech-nology; it’s our own imagination. I think thecloser you get to Silicon Valley, the more youconfuse the word “invention” with theword “research” and the word “innova-

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Bill Buxton

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