Making Research-Based Design Decisions:
Results of Research Poll

by Dr. Bob Bailey

October, 2002

In last month's User Interface Design Monthly Update Article I tried to illustrate how difficult it can be for practitioners to use the Web to find current usability articles. In the article, researchers and practitioners were asked to respond with where they published and how they found up-to-date articles.

Researchers: The researchers who responded provided no one place to publish that seems to be the most desirable. There was no consensus on a favored place to publish so that practitioners would be sure to read their study. Almost all responses included the proceedings of the three major usability conferences in the United States (CHI, HFES and UPA), and four major journals including Human Factors, International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, Technical Communication, and the Communications of the ACM. Most of these articles are not readily available to practitioners on the Web.

Practitioners: The practitioners who responded provided additional interesting information. Over half indicated that the first thing they do is an Internet search, usually with Google. About one-third of the respondents accessed the archived newsletters now located at webusability.com, useit.com and uie.com. About 20% stated that they used the ACM Digital Library. Other sources of information that were frequently mentioned included retrieving information from the four major organizations (UPA, SIGCHI, HFES and STC), and the International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction. Other sources included Wichita State University's usability newsletter, two daily digests (UTEST, CHI-WEB), and three Web sites (usability.gov, hcibib.org and usableweb.com).

Based on this limited exercise, it is fairly clear that usability information is being published in a variety of different locations. Most of it is still paper-based, and most current, full articles are not readily available on the Internet. This makes it very difficult for many (most) practitioners to use this information in a timely way.

From a practitioner's perspective, I suspect that those articles that can be found using a Google search will have much more impact on their design decisions than those that are much more difficult to find and retrieve.