www.btinternet.com/~adrian.larner/review/dillon
Designing Usable Electronic Text
Andrew Dillon
Taylor & Francis, 1994, 195pp, softbound, £18.00
ISBN 0 7484 0113 X
A Review by Adrian Larner for the Computer Journal
This book is about reading. Andrew Dillon is an applied psychologist and a researcher in the Human Computer Interface (HCI, although he remarks, “this acronym was often shortened to CHI” – think about it). “Reading” (not in the index) is used in a sense somewhat wider than we might expect, and includes navigation around a text either on paper or held electronically, principally in hypertext.
Dillon refers to sixteen papers of which he was the first listed author, and others of which he was an author. These are among his more than two hundred references; but then, his researches show that 73% of “readers” of academic journal articles access them as “background material for work purposes” (know what I mean?), but only 46% read them to keep their knowledge up to date. Perhaps he thought the time had come to summarise all his research in a book, padded – as is all too common – by a massive review that would do wonders for all his fellow-researchers’ citation indices, but little for their credibility. He should have thought again.
“[T]he user interface is for many people, all they see and know about the computer.” The punctuation is idiosyncratic. “Shackel ... states that ... usability ... can be defined as: ... capability ... to be used easily and effectively by ... users, given specified training ...” Dillon concludes: “The key aspects are ‘easily’ ... the user – with or without training as specified – must not find it difficult ...” (My emphases; his logic.) “[T]he reader ... may decide that they can comprehend [a given text] only by not reading it at all.” Words fail me; and he them. “In the first experiment, ... every second paragraph was removed from the ... text.... In some cases ... implications were grasped [by readers of these mutilated texts] ... however ... most of the ... reports ... suggest[ed] little attempt to grasp the development of the argument within the text.” Strange that. “[I]t is not expected that such a framework could be handed over to non-human scientists ...” with their funny pointy ears.
But what does he have to say? (That is, other than the incomprehensible pun in the dedication, and the literary quotations in the chapter headings – human science, you see; science but not as we know it.) From the first four chapters we gather that most human factors experts have found nothing – except what is false, trivial, or commonsense – to say about reading or any other aspect of system design, and (consequently?) designers ignore them. From the last six chapters we learn, when designing a text presentation system, (1) to consider what kinds of information the texts convey, why people read them, and how people access them; and (2) to work out the users’ requirements (the “Task Model”), the structures of the texts (the “Information Model”), and the methods of text handling to be provided (“Manipulation Skills and Facilities”); also, to get to understand something of how people read (the “Serial Reading Processor”).
There needs no ghost, my lord, come from the grave, to tell us this. (Hamlet Act 1, Sc. 5)
Copyright © 1994, 2001 Adrian Larner. The author asserts all moral rights.
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