Paper Reading #3 - Hard to Use Interfaces

Title:
Hard-to-use interfaces considered beneficial (some of the time)


Comments:
Comment1-Evin
Comment2-Shena


Reference:


Hard-to-use interfaces considered beneficial (some of the time)
Yann Riche, Nathalie Riche, Petra Isenberg, Anastasia Bezerianos
CHI 2010 Atlanta, Georgia


Summary:
This paper discussed two instances of difficult to use interfaces.  First was from an unrelated study.  In this study, there was a multiple groups of people, and each group had to navigate and perform certain tasks on the same computer with different mouses and pointers.  There was an unknown bug.  The problem was that when multiple users were moving their pointer at the same time, there would be slight deviations with the mouse movement.  The groups worked past it their own way.  One group's users asked the rest to wait for them to finish so there was no mistakes.  Another group, some participants waited until the rest were done before attempting the task.  The difficulty of the pointers caused an increase of collaboration between participants that would have not happened without it.  


The second experiment involved a group of elderly people that took a bunch of workshop courses over several weeks.  These workshops were designed to help them use more up to date communication tools like email.  The participants came to the conclusion that they did not like to use these forms of communication, and preferred to stick to things like writing letters. They said that this preference was due to the fact that things like email are to impersonal.  When writing a letter, you have to take the time to write it out, edit it, put it in an envelope, and mail it. Whereas people would send the same size email in just a few minutes.  They use the personalization of letters, and the fact that they mean more to both ends of the communication as an argument why sometimes harder interfaces are better.


Discussion:
I was interested in this paper.  I thought that it was almost ironic that while working on one study turned up data for a completely unrelated topic.  I definitely agree about the use of email.  It is becoming an epidemic in our society how much we rely on the internet for communication.  Almost all of my friends I don't talk to over the phone.  I will text them, Facebook chat them, or even just send them a message on Facebook.  It would be nice if we took the time to sit down and think about what we were writing without relying on spell check.