Harold Thimbleby
Has also published under the name of:
"H. W. Thimbleby" and "H. Thimbleby"
Personal Homepage:
cs.swansea.ac.uk/~csharoldCurrent place of employment:
Swansea University, Wales
About the author:
No description available of Harold Thimbleby...
Publications by Harold Thimbleby (bibliography)
» 2009 «
Thimbleby, Harold (2009): Interaction programming: next steps. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2009 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2009. pp. 3811-3816. Available online
“Interaction programming bridges the gap between interaction design and programming, but it has not yet been related directly to mainstream development practice. This paper presents UI model discovery tools to enable existing systems and traditional development processes to benefit from interaction programming tools and methods.”
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» 2008 «
Thimbleby, Harold (2008): Ignorance of interaction programming is killing people. In Interactions, 15 (5) pp. 52-57
Thimbleby, Harold (2008): Robot ethics? Not yet: A reflection on Whitby's "Sometimes it's hard to be a robot. In Interacting with Computers, 20 (3) pp. 338-341
“Science fiction stories seductively portray robots as human. In present reality (early 21st century) robots are machines, even though they can do many things far better than humans (fly, swim, play chess to name a few). Any ethics for or of robots is therefore a seductive mix of fiction and reality. The key issue for rational discourse is to provide a rigorous framework for reasoning about the issues, including identifying flaws in the framework. We find such meta-reasoning in discussion about robot ethics to be ready for improvement. This paper takes its inspiration from B. Whitby, "Sometimes it's hard to be a robot: A call for action on the ethics of abusing artificial agents," Interacting with Computers, this issue, 2008.”
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Holzinger, Andreas, Thimbleby, Harold and Beale, Russell (2008): Workshop HCI for Medicine and Health Care (HCI4MED). In: Proceedings of the HCI08 Conference on People and Computers XXII 2008. pp. 191-192. Available online
“Ensuring good usability can be seen as the key success factor in our whole digital world: technology must support people. In particular, Medicine and Healthcare are currently subject to exceedingly rapid technological change. Vital areas for the economy include health of nations; medicine and healthcare entangles everybody, accordingly the role of usability is of increasing importance. Consequently, Medicine and Healthcare are a great challenge for Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research; however, it is of vital importance that the findings are integrated into engineering at a systemic level. Information Processing, in particular its potential effectiveness in modern Health Services and the optimization of processes and operational sequences, is of increasing interest, but we need to ensure that we engineer effective solutions as well as understanding the stakeholders and the issues they can and do encounter. It is particularly important for Medical Information Systems (e.g. Hospital Information Systems and Decision Support Systems) to be designed from the perspective of the end users, especially given that this is a diverse set of people.”
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Cox, Anna L., Cairns, Paul, Thimbleby, Harold and Webb, Natalie (2008): Research Methods for HCI. In: Proceedings of the HCI08 Conference on People and Computers XXII 2008. pp. 221-222. Available online
“The aim of the tutorial is to help researchers, particularly early career researchers, to develop the appropriate skills to make a useful research contribution to Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). This is in recognition of the fact that HCI draws on a wide variety of disciplines which means that there is a wide variety of methods that a researcher could use and moreover new researchers may have education or experience in only a small fraction of the methods available.”
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» 2007 «
Thimbleby, Harold (2007): Press On. Principles of interaction programming.. Boston, USA., MIT Press
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“Press On is in three parts:
Part I: Context: Interactive systems and devices do not fulfill their potential for economic,
social, psychological, and technical reasons.
Part I I Principles: Computer science provides many practical creative ideas and theories that can drive effective interaction programming.
Part I I I Press On: While knowing the science is fundamental, it is also essential to have the right attitudes and approaches to managing the complexity of designing systems for
people to use. The interaction programmer must never say, "it's not my job
to..." - interaction programming means understanding and weaving the
science into the big picture.”
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Oshlyansky, Lidia, Cairns, Paul and Thimbleby, Harold (2007): Validating the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) Tool Cross-Culturally. In: Proceedings of the HCI07 Conference on People and Computers XXI 2007. p. 21. Available online
“HCI methods and tools are often used cross-culturally before being tested for appropriateness and validity. As new tools emerge, they must be cross-culturally validated to ensure that they work with all audiences, not just those in the country in which they were developed. This paper presents the validation of a technology acceptance model over nine culturally-diverse countries. The model validated is the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT). The paper also explores ongoing analysis of the culture differences that emerge on UTAUT measures, and suggests avenues for future work.”
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Thimbleby, Harold and Harrison, Michael (2007): Names and Reference in User Interfaces. In: Proceedings of the HCI07 Conference on People and Computers XXI 2007. p. 27. Available online
“This short paper argues that references in user interfaces, in particular names and the values they denote, are often designed in a way that is incomplete and inconsistent thereby causing problems for users. This paper explores names and values through illustrations in order to clear the way for a more systematic approach to the design of names and reference.”
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Thimbleby, Harold and Thimbleby, Will (2007): Internalist and Externalist HCI. In: Proceedings of the HCI07 Conference on People and Computers XXI 2007. p. 28. Available online
“The history of technology, as a discipline, supports alternate points of view termed internalist and externalist, which terms highlight an approximately similar division in points of view within HCI. Conventional HCI is externalist, rightly concerned with human-centered issues; but externalism risks ignoring important internalist issues. A successful human-computer system is better if it is successful from both perspectives. This discussion paper argues that the externalist view, while necessary and immensely useful, is not sufficient -- and in the worst case, risks eclipsing innovation from internalist quarters.”
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» 2004 «
Thimbleby, Harold and Gow, Jeremy (2004): Computer algebra in interface design research. In: Nunes, Nuno Jardim and Rich, Charles (eds.) International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces 2004 January 13-16, 2004, Funchal, Madeira, Portugal. pp. 366-367. Available online
“Tools to design, analyse and evaluate user interfaces can be used in user interface design research and in interface modelling research. This demonstration shows two working systems: one in Mathematica that is mathematically sophisticated, and one as a 'conventional' rapid application development environment, where the mathematics is hidden, and which could form the basis of a professional design tool -- but which is based rigorously on the same algebraic formalism.”
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Oshlyansky, Lidia, Thimbleby, Harold and Cairns, Paul (2004): Breaking affordance: culture as context. In: Proceedings of the Third Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction October 23-27, 2004, Tampere, Finland. pp. 81-84. Available online
“The concept of affordance as it applies to user interface design is widely used and accepted; possibly overused. This paper explores one of the constraints on affordance: culture. Graduate and undergraduate students in the United Kingdom and the United States were surveyed and asked to make judgements about the behaviour of abstracted Western-like objects. The study clearly shows that UK subjects thought the down position of a light switch indicates it is "ON"; for their US counterparts it was "OFF." We suggest that context (in the case of this study, culture) is often overlooked, but is central to affordance, to computer interface design, as well as to action and activity more generally.”
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Buchanan, George, Blandford, Ann, Thimbleby, Harold and Jones, Matt (2004): Integrating information seeking and structuring: exploring the role of spatial hypertext in a digital library. In: Proceedings of the Fifteenth ACM Conference on Hypertext 2004. pp. 225-234. Available online
“This paper presents Garnet, a novel spatial hypertext interface to a digital library. Garnet supports both information structuring - via spatial hypertext - and traditional information seeking - via a digital library. A user study of Garnet is reported, together with an analysis of how the organizing work done by users in a spatial hypertext workspace could support later information seeking. The use of Garnet during the study is related to both digital library and spatial hypertext research. Spatial hypertexts support the detection of implicit document groups in a user's workspace. The study also investigates the degree of similarity found in the full text of documents within such document groups.”
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Thimbleby, Harold (2004): User interface design with matrix algebra. In ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 11 (2) pp. 181-236
“It is usually very hard, both for designers and users, to reason reliably about user interfaces. This article shows that 'push button' and 'point and click' user interfaces are algebraic structures. Users effectively do algebra when they interact, and therefore we can be precise about some important design issues and issues of usability. Matrix algebra, in particular, is useful for explicit calculation and for proof of various user interface properties. With matrix algebra, we are able to undertake with ease unusally thorough reviews of real user interfaces: this article examines a mobile phone, a handheld calculator and a digital multimeter as case studies, and draws general conclusions about the approach and its relevance to design.”
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» 2003 «
Jones, Matt, Buchanan, George and Thimbleby, Harold (2003): Improving web search on small screen devices. In Interacting with Computers, 15 (4) pp. 479-495
“Small handheld devices -- mobile phones, Pocket PCs etc. -- are increasingly being used to access the web. Search engines are the most used web services and are an important factor of user support. Search engine providers have begun to offer their services on the small screen. This paper presents a detailed evaluation of the how easy to use such services are in these new contexts. An experiment was carried out to compare users' abilities to complete search tasks using a mobile phone-sized, handheld computer-sized and conventional, desktop interface to the full Google index. With all three interfaces, when users succeed in completing a task, they do so quickly (within 2-3 min) and using few interactions with the search engine. When they fail, though, they fail badly. The paper examines the causes of failures in small screen searching and proposes guidelines for improving these interfaces. In addition, we present and discuss novel interaction schemes that put these guidelines into practice.”
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» 2002 «
Thimbleby, Harold, Blandford, Ann, Cairns, P., Curzon, P. and Jones, M. (2002): User Interface Design as Systems Design. In: Proceedings of the HCI02 Conference on People and Computers XVI 2002. pp. 281-302.
» 2001 «
Thimbleby, Harold (2001): Permissive User Interfaces. In International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 54 (3) pp. 333-350
“User interfaces often only support one way to do a task when the physical interface or the requirements of the task would permit other ways. In contrast, a user interface that supports multiple approaches is permissive. This paper argues that permissive user interfaces are easier to use-and even when they are not applicable for particular applications, considering permissiveness is a productive design heuristic. Many user interfaces are difficult to use yet very easily demonstrated or explained by experts-with the results that users become frustrated because hindsight makes usability problems look like the user's own fault. The lack of permissiveness in such user interfaces explains this paradox.”
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Thimbleby, Harold, Cairns, Paul and Jones, Matt (2001): Usability analysis with Markov models. In ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 8 (2) pp. 99-132
“How hard to users to find interactive devices to use to achieve their goals, and how can we get this information early enough to influence design? We show that Markov modeling can obtain suitable measures, and we provide formulas that can be used for a large class of systems. We analyze and consider alternative designs for various real examples. We introduce a "knowldege/usability graph," which shows the impact of even a smaller amount of knowledge for the user, and the extent to which designers' knowledge may bias their views of usability. Markov models can be built into design tools, and can therefore be made very convenient for designers to utilize. One would hope that in the future, design tools would include such mathematical analysis, and no new design skills would be required to evaluate devices. A particular concern of this paper is to make the approach accessible. Complete program code and all the underlying mathematics are provided in appendices to enable others to replicate and test all results shown.”
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Theng, Yin Leng, Mohd-Nasir, Norliza, Buchanan, George, Fields, Bob, Thimbleby, Harold, Cassidy, Noel and Cassidy, Noel (2001): Dynamic Digital Libraries for Children. In: JCDL01: Proceedings of the 1st ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries 2001. pp. 406-415. Available online
“The majority of current digital libraries (DLs) are not designed for children. For DLs to be popular with children, they need to be fun, easy-to-use and empower them, whether as readers or authors. This paper describes a new children's DL emphasizing its design and evaluation, working with the children (11-14 year olds) as design partners and testers. A truly participatory process was used, and observational study was used as a means of refinement to the initial design of the DL prototype. In contrast with current DLs, the children's DL provides both a static as well as a dynamic environment to encourage active engagement of children in using it. Design, implementation and security issues are also raised.”
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Buchanan, George, Farrant, Sarah, Jones, Matt, Thimbleby, Harold, Marsden, Gary and Pazzani, Michael (2001): Improving mobile internet usability. In: Proceedings of the 2001 International Conference on the World Wide Web 2001. pp. 673-680. Available online
» 2000 «
Thimbleby, Harold (2000): Calculators are Needlessly Bad. In International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 52 (6) pp. 1031-1069
“In the two decades hand-held calculators have been readily available, there has been ample time to develop a usable design and to educate the consumer public into choosing quality devices. This article reviews a representative calculator that is "state of the art" and shows it has an execrable design. The design is shown to be confusing and essentially non-mathematical. Substantial evidence is presented that illustrates the inadequate documentation, bad implementation, feature interaction, and feature incoherence. These problems are shown to be typical of calculators generally. Despite the domain (arithmetic) being well defined, the design problems are profound, widespread, confusing-and needless. Worrying questions are begged: about design quality control, about consumer behaviour, and about the role of education-both at school level (training children to acquiesce to bad design) and at university level (training professionals to design unusable products). The article concludes with recommendations. "The problem of efficient and uniform notations is perhaps the most serious one facing the mathematical public." Florian Cajori (1993) "[. . .] contrivances adapted to peculiar purposes [. . .] and what is worse than all, a profusion of notations (when we regard the whole science) which threaten, if not duly corrected, to multiply our difficulties instead of promoting our progress." Charles Babbage, quoted in Cajori (1993).”
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Theng, Yin Leng, Mohd-Nasir, Norliza and Thimbleby, Harold (2000): Purpose and Usability of Digital Libraries. In: DL00: Proceedings of the 5th ACM International Conference on Digital Libraries 2000. pp. 238-239. Available online
“A preliminary study was conducted to help understand the purpose of digital libraries (DLs) and to investigate whether meaningful results could be obtained from small user studies of digital libraries. Results stress the importance of mental models, and of "traditional" library support.”
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Theng, Yin Leng, Mohd-Nasir, Norliza, Thimbleby, Harold, Buchanan, George and Jones, Matthew (2000): Designing a Children's Digital Library With and For Children. In: DL00: Proceedings of the 5th ACM International Conference on Digital Libraries 2000. pp. 266-267. Available online
“This paper describes preliminary work carried out to design a children's digital library of stories and poems with and for children aged 11-14 years old. We describe our experience in engaging children as design partners, and propose a digital library environment and design features to provide an engaging, successful learning experience for children using it for collaborative writing.”
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Thimbleby, Harold (2000): Analysis and Simulation of User Interfaces. In: Proceedings of the HCI00 Conference on People and Computers XIV 2000. pp. 221-238.
» 1999 «
Buchanan, George, Marsden, Gil and Thimbleby, Harold (1999): Dynamic Metadata for Monitoring Digital Library Management. In: DL99: Proceedings of the 4th ACM International Conference on Digital Libraries 1999. pp. 219-220. Available online
» 1997 «
Thimbleby, Harold (1997): Gentler: A Tool for Systematic Web Authoring. In International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 47 (1) pp. 139-168
“We argue, with theoretical justification, that authoring hypertext and World Wide Web documents requires tool support if it is to be done well. Tools are essential for good design; without them iterative design and user testing are impractical to follow through because of the prohibitive costs of making even small changes reliably. Gentler is one such authoring tool. It uses a database of pages and a page layout language, providing reliable design features including hypertext linkage and navigation. With Gentler as a concrete example, we introduce an important principle for design: dual requirements. Features that hypertext document readers find beneficial are beneficial for document authors, and vice versa.”
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Thimbleby, Harold, O'Conaill, Brid and Thomas, Peter J. (eds.) Proceedings of the Twelfth Conference of the British Computer Society Human Computer Interaction Specialist Group - People and Computers XII August, 1997, Bristol, England, UK.
Theng, Yin Leng, Rigny, Cecile, Thimbleby, Harold and Jones, Matthew (1997): HyperAT: HCI and Web Authoring. In: Thimbleby, Harold, O'Conaill, Brid and Thomas, Peter J. (eds.) Proceedings of the Twelfth Conference of the British Computer Society Human Computer Interaction Specialist Group - People and Computers XII August, 1997, Bristol, England, UK. pp. 359-378.
“We review HCI problems with hypertext, and for authoring World Wide Web documents in particular. We suggest that a framework is required to understand the usability issues, and that these issues cannot be seen as psychological or computing: they are multi-disciplinary. We discuss HyperAT, a prototype authoring tool, being implemented to test these ideas.”
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» 1996 «
Thimbleby, Harold and Addison, Mark (1996): Intelligent Adaptive Assistance and its Automatic Generation. In Interacting with Computers, 8 (1) pp. 51-68
“Manuals and interactive help are tedious to provide, difficult to maintain, and difficult to ensure that they remain correct, even for simple systems. The result is a loss in product quality, felt particularly by users and designers committed to long-term product development. The paper shows that it is possible to systematically put a system specification and its documentation into exact correspondence. It follows that much previously manual work can be done automatically and with considerable advantages, including guaranteed correctness and completeness, as well as supporting powerful new features such as intelligent adaptive assistance. This paper shows how interactive assistance can be provided to answer 'how to?', 'why not?' and other questions.”
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» 1995 «
Thimbleby, Harold and Addison, Mark (1995): HyperDoc: An Interactive Systems Tool. In: Kirby, M. A. R., Dix, Alan J. and Finlay, Janet E. (eds.) Proceedings of the Tenth Conference of the British Computer Society Human Computer Interaction Specialist Group - People and Computers X August, 1995, Huddersfield, UK. pp. 95-106.
“HyperDoc is an interactive development tool for designing interactive devices. Although HyperDoc's main purpose is to help design and analyse interactive devices and their manuals, it can also be used to investigate and demonstrate interactive help. HyperDoc itself represents a future user interface for many types of interactive consumer products, such as VCRs and TVs. Exciting developments of HyperDoc include integrating it as an operating system primitive, thus ensuring all systems can be both well-designed and well-documented. Introduction Background Quick HyperDoc Overview HyperDoc: The System Notes on Finite State Machines Simulation Environment User Manual Production Interactive Help/Assistance Assistance: Teaching and Doing -- and Designing HyperDoc's Assistance How to? Where am I? What now? How do I go back? Why? Why not? Tasks State Map (Finite State Machine) Future Perspectives Flexible Manual Structures Conclusions”
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Thimbleby, Harold and Ladkin, Peter B. (1995): A Proper Explanation When You Need One. In: Kirby, M. A. R., Dix, Alan J. and Finlay, Janet E. (eds.) Proceedings of the Tenth Conference of the British Computer Society Human Computer Interaction Specialist Group - People and Computers X August, 1995, Huddersfield, UK. pp. 107-118.
“Quality program design has received considerable attention from the software engineering community. Quality user manual design has received considerable attention from the human computer interaction community. Yet manuals and systems are often independently conceived, and thus do not well complement each other. This paper shows one method of easily obtaining correct and complete user manuals guaranteed to correspond with the system they document. The method has considerable merit for improving interactive systems design.”
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» 1994 «
Addison, Mark and Thimbleby, Harold (1994): Manuals as Structured Programs. In: Cockton, Gilbert, Draper, Steven and Weir, George R. S. (eds.) Proceedings of the Ninth Conference of the British Computer Society Human Computer Interaction Specialist Group - People and Computers IX August 23-26, 1994, Glasgow, Scotland, UK. pp. 67-79.
“A user manual may provide instructions that, if the user follows them, achieve any of certain objectives as determined by the manual designers. A manual may therefore be viewed rather like a computer program, as pre-planned instructions. Accordingly, software engineering and its methods may be applied mutatis mutandis to the manual and its design process. We consider structured programming methods, and show that some difficulties with user interfaces may be attributed to manuals being 'unstructured'. Since there are many programming metrics, and very many styles of manuals for user interfaces, this paper is concerned with justifying the approach and showing how insightful it is.”
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Thimbleby, Harold (1994): Formulating Usability. In ACM SIGCHI Bulletin, 26 (2) pp. 59-64
» 1993 «
Thimbleby, Harold and Thimbleby, Will (1993): Solutioneering in User Interface Design. In Behaviour and Information Technology, 12 (3) pp. 190-193
“The aim of this paper is to encourage more considered design by discussing one of the consequences of narrow problem solving. We discuss a way in which designers solve their own problems, rather than address broader issues of user-centred design. We use the term 'solutioneering' for this. Having available a word for an attitude helps it to be mastered consciously.”
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Thimbleby, Harold (1993): Combining Systems and Manuals. In: Alty, James L., Diaper, Dan and Guest, D. (eds.) Proceedings of the Eighth Conference of the British Computer Society Human Computer Interaction Specialist Group - People and Computers VIII August 7-10, 1993, Loughborough University, UK. pp. 479-488.
“Like many interactive systems, hypertext is operated by button pressing. It is therefore possible to combine an interactive system with its own hypertext manual. Numerous advantages follow: adaptive intelligent interactive help; correct documentation, in natural or mathematical language; automatic generation of conventional manuals optimised for various tasks; and detailed analysis. This paper motivates the approach, and describes a representative system, Hyperdoc. Hyperdoc enables research questions about good user interfaces and good user manuals to be investigated.”
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Cockburn, Andy and Thimbleby, Harold (1993): Reducing User Effort in Collaboration Support. In: Gray, Wayne D., Hefley, William and Murray, Dianne (eds.) International Workshop on Intelligent User Interfaces 1993 January 4-7, 1993, Orlando, Florida, USA. pp. 215-218. Available online
“The value of electronic mail as a medium for collaborative and coordinated work can be enhanced by relating messages to conversations. While some groupware systems have offered such facilities, their ability to assess conversational context is dependent on explicit user action and the use of specific systems by all collaborators. This paper describes Mona, a novel conversation based email platform. Mona provides a hypertext representation of conversational context without requiring any additional effort from the user or the use of specific email systems by other collaborators. Mona's lack of requirements and independence is made possible by inferring conversational context with heuristics using information inherently transferred in all email communications. Mona's heuristics are described, as are its mechanisms for personalising conversation views.”
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» 1992 «
Cockburn, Andy and Thimbleby, Harold (1992): Automatic Conversational Context: Avoiding Dependency on User Effort in Groupware. In: Proceedings of OZCHI92, the CHISIG Annual Conference on Human-Computer Interaction 1992. pp. 142-149.
“Relating individual messages to their on-going conversations enhances the value of electronic mail as a medium for collaborative and coordinated work. Some groupware systems have offered these facilities, but their ability to determine conversational context is dependent on explicit user actions -- being told -- and the use of specific systems by all users involved. This paper describes Mona, an email system that provides an automatic hypertext representation of conversational context. Mona is novel in that conversation facilities are provided without requiring any user effort or the use of particular systems by other collaborators. This lack of requirements and independence is made possible by inferring conversational context with heuristics from information inherent in all email communications. Mona's heuristics are described, together with its central design motivation: that the cost/benefit disparity resulting from dependency on user actions is liable to cause system rejection.”
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» 1991 «
Witten, Ian H., Thimbleby, Harold, Coulouris, G. F. and Greenberg, Saul (1991): Liveware: A New Approach to Sharing Data in Social Networks. In International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, 34 (3) pp. 337-348
“While most schemes that support information sharing on computers rely on formal protocols, in practice much cooperative work takes place using informal means of communication, even chance encounters. This paper proposes a new method of enabling information sharing in loosely-couple socially-organized systems, typically involving personal rather than institutional computers and lacking the network infrastructure that is generally taken for granted in distributed computing. It is based on the idea of arranging for information transmission to take place as an unobtrusive side-effect of interpersonal communication. Update conflicts are avoided by an information ownership scheme. Under mild assumptions, we show how the distributed database satisfies the property of observational consistency. The new idea, called "Liveware", is not so much a specific piece of technology as a fresh perspective on information sharing that stimulates new ways of solving old problems. Being general, it transcends particular distribution technologies. A prototype database, implemented in HyperCard and taking the form of an electronic directory, utilizes the medium of floppy disk to spread information in a (benign!) virus-like manner.”
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Cockburn, Andrew J. G. and Thimbleby, Harold (1991): A Reflective Perspective of CSCW. In ACM SIGCHI Bulletin, 23 (3) pp. 63-68
“Personal computing has had a major effect on the way that many people work; whole organisations have been revolutionised by tools such as filing systems and word processors. Whilst personal computing has enhanced the execution of work it has largely failed to support the cooperative environment in which it is done. CSCW (Computer Supported Cooperative Work) aims to remove this artificial division caused by the systemic focus on the single user and to replace it with systems supporting the wider, social, web of cooperation. Unfortunately CSCW in practice has failed in this task. This paper briefly discusses the reasons for this failure, and proposes a "reflexive perspective" of CSCW as an emphasis shift in current CSCW research which, it is argued and demonstrated by example, will result in greater success for future cooperative systems.”
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» 1990 «
Thimbleby, Harold (1990): User Interface Design. Reading, MA, ACM Press
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Thimbleby, Harold (1990): You're Right About the Cure: Don't Do That. In Interacting with Computers, 2 (1) pp. 8-25
“A major factor of system usability is whether the system works at all. This paper discusses bugs and the social environment that allows and encourages them to exist. Many bugs are known about and accepted when software is released to users. They could have been corrected if there had been any motivation to do so. Although individual programmers are often responsible for bugs, various forces within the computing industry, including mistrust of users, drive software manufacturers to strategies that exacerbate the problems. Such methods as software manufacturers adopt 'in defence' not only work against users but also undermine scientific work, which in turn retards the advancement of HCI generally.”
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Thimbleby, Harold, Anderson, Stuart and Witten, Ian H. (1990): Reflexive CSCW: Supporting Long-Term Personal Work. In Interacting with Computers, 2 (3) pp. 330-336
“CSCW (computer-supported cooperative work) is an active research area with many promising applications and benefits. We argue that the plight of the individual user can also be viewed as a CSCW problem, for the individual frequently acts as multiple persona: performing many independent tasks, perhaps in several places. We propose reflexive CSCW to address such issues. Solutions in the reflexive case will of course be of benefit to users even if they are working in a conventional multi-user CSCW context; proposed solutions in CSCW can be re-presented for individual users.”
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Harrison, Michael and Thimbleby, Harold (eds.) (1990): Formal Methods in Human-Computer Interaction. Cambridge, UK, Cambridge University Press
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» 1989 «
Thimbleby, Harold (1989): Bugs: The Issue Facing HCI. In: Sutcliffe, Alistair and Macauley, Linda (eds.) Proceedings of the Fifth Conference of the British Computer Society Human Computer Interaction Specialist Group - People and Computers V August 5-8, 1989, University of Nottingham, UK. pp. 105-107.
» 1987 «
Thimbleby, Harold (1987): A Menu Selection Algorithm. In Behaviour and Information Technology, 6 (1) pp. 89-94
“A simple algorithm for menu selection, which enhances existing methods for small menus (e.g., fewer than 20 entries) is discussed. Algorithms are presented in Pascal.”
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» 1986 «
Runciman, Colin and Thimbleby, Harold (1986): Equal Opportunity Interactive Systems. In International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, 25 (4) pp. 439-451
“One view of interactive computer systems is that the user, having problems to solve, supplies the "givens" of these problems to the machine, which in response supplies as output the "unknowns". Reassigning or discarding these labels "givens" and "unknown" is a time-honoured heuristic for problem-solving. Also, people seem to prefer interpretations without such labels for fast interactive systems, and mere speed in systems that do embody fixed distinctions between input and output often contributes little towards ease of use -- it may only serve to emphasize a frustrating mechanical dumbness. We therefore apply the same heuristic to the design of interactive computer systems, noting that a number of existing successful interactive system styles can be viewed as the outcome if this approach.”
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Thimbleby, Harold (1986): Ease of Use -- The Ultimate Deception. In: Harrison, Michael D. and Monk, Andrew (eds.) Proceedings of the Second Conference of the British Computer Society Human Computer Interaction Specialist Group - People and Computers II August 23-26, 1986, University of York, UK. pp. 78-94.
“A correspondence is drawn between the historical development of mathematics and the development of users' conceptual models of interactive computer systems. Many mathematical concepts took centuries to resolve but computer users are often expected to handle comparable issues much more rapidly. Insights into user interface issues are drawn from non-standard analysis and non-Euclidean geometry. Mindful of Godel, I argue that if a system is sufficiently powerful to be 'easy to use' this implies it is sufficient to confuse.”
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Thimbleby, Harold (1986): The Design of Two Innovative User Interfaces. In: Harrison, Michael D. and Monk, Andrew (eds.) Proceedings of the Second Conference of the British Computer Society Human Computer Interaction Specialist Group - People and Computers II August 23-26, 1986, University of York, UK. pp. 336-351.
“Two innovative user interfaces are described: one for an arithmetic calculator and one for a spreadsheet. The emphasis of the paper is on the designs themselves and on the underlying rationale. The interfaces were developed methodically, using a heuristic of property closure. User interface issues which arise are discussed and include: equal opportunity, declarative conceptual models, non-determinism, and implied task domain.”
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» 1985 «
Harrison, Michael D. and Thimbleby, Harold (1985): Formalising Guidelines for the Design of Interactive Systems. In: Johnson, Peter and Cook, Stephen (eds.) Proceedings of the Conference of the British Computer Society Human Computer Interaction Specialist Group - People and Computers I August 17-20, 1985, University of East Anglia. pp. 161-171.
“User engineering principles may be formalised as theorems over specifications of interactive systems. In this paper we discuss some different categories of user engineering principle and expose issues that must be resolved to produce effective formalisation.”
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» 1984 «
Thimbleby, Harold (1984): Generative User-Engineering Principles for User Interface Design. In: Shackel, Brian (ed.) INTERACT 84 - 1st IFIP International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction September 4-7, 1984, London, UK. pp. 661-666.
“Generative user-engineering principles are assertions about interactive system behaviour and have equivalent colloquial forms. Current work shows that they are a promising contribution to the design of acceptable user interfaces, because they effectively bridge the conceptual gap between designer and user. In colloquial form a generative user-engineering principle can be used to help clarify requirements in participative design, or to explicate documentation. In rigorous form, generative user-engineering principles provide a constructive higher order consistency on user interfaces.”
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» 1983 «
Thimbleby, Harold (1983): Guidelines for 'Manipulative' Text Editing. In Behaviour and Information Technology, 2 (2) pp. 127-161
“The term 'manipulative' text editing is introduced to describe the low level aspect of text input/editing user interfaces, where editing commands are almost entirely manipulative rather than symbolic, primarily for editing at a word and character level. Manipulative editing covers the use of function keys such as 'rubout', cursor motion and various methods for inserting text. A variety of methods commonly used for manipulative editing are critically reviewed in order to gather together a number of relevant guidelines. This paper proposes the basis for an effective standard which encourages the ready acquisition of skill.”
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» 1982 «
Thimbleby, Harold (1982): Character Level Ambiguity: Consequences for User Interface Design. In International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, 16 (2) pp. 211-225
“Certain user interface functions require single- or few-character interactions and in some systems the number of functions which is made available exceeds the number of suitable key combinations. Hence modes are introduced; keys can be given different interpretations in different modes. But this is a source of user interface ambiguity; if there are too many frequently-used modes then the user can make errors all too easily. Definite user interface techniques, which are discussed, can be chosen to increase ease of use/user satisfaction: for instance, by reducing the number of necessary modes or the consequences of user typing errors. To make an interface consistent and predictable requires considerable effort, even if only at this level of single character semantics.”
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» 1980 «
Thimbleby, Harold (1980): Dialogue Determination. In International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, 13 (3) pp. 295-304
“A new term, determination, is introduced to help describe the quality of interactive systems' user interfaces. A well determining interface is neither too under-determining nor too over-determining for its user; under-determination can be brought about by excessive secrecy and over-determination by excessive authoritarianism on the part of the computer (or its programmers). The concept is used to elucidate several important aspects of effective interaction. Determination is not solely a property of system design but depends on the experience and values of the user.”
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Mar 15th, 2010
Changes to this page (author)
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