#19143
ACM’s Computing Professionals Face New Challenges 
The ACM community is in a position to take a leadership role in responding to the challenges brought by last fall’s terror attacks. Some of us have already been contacted to contribute to designs for improving security at airports, verifying identity at check-in, or redesigning cockpits to give more options to pilots and ground controllers. Others will be asked to redesign systems that trace financial transactions across international borders or examine email patterns among loosely affiliated groups. These efforts win the broadest support when our decisions about how to pursue safety and security are coupled with a strong defense of civil liberties and privacy.
Shneiderman, Ben. University of Maryland (2001). Articles>TC>Professionalism
#23117
Facilitating Data Exploration with Query Previews: A Study of User Performance and Preference
Current networked and local data exploration systems that use command languages (e.g. SQL), menus, or form fillin interfaces do not give users an indication of the distribution of data in their databases. This often leads users to waste time, posing queries that have zero-hit or mega-hit results. Query previews are a novel visual approach for browsing and querying networked or local databases. Query previews supply users with data distribution information for selected attributes of a database, and give continuous feedback about the size of the result set as the query is being formed. Subsequent refinements might be necessary to narrow the search sufficiently. Because there is a risk that query previews are an additional step, leading to a more complex and slow search process, we ran a within subjects empirical study with 12 subjects who used interfaces with and without query previews and with no network delays. Even with this small number of subjects and minimized network delays we found statistically significant differences showing that query previews could speed up performance 1.6 to 2.1 times and lead to higher subjective satisfaction.
Tanin, Egemen, Amnon Lotem, Ihab Haddadin, Ben Shneiderman, Catherine Plaisant and Laura Slaughter. SHORE (1999). Design>User Interface>Usability>Search
#14235
The goal of universal access to information and communications services is compelling. Enthusiastic networking innovators, business leaders, and government policy makers see opportunities and benefits from widespread usage. But even if they succeed and the economies of scale bring low costs, computing researchers will still have much work to do. They will have to deal with the difficult question: How can information and communications services be made usable for every citizen? Designing for experienced frequent users is difficult enough, but designing for a broad audience of unskilled users is a far greater challenge. Scaling up from a listserv for 100 software engineers to 100,000 schoolteachers to 100,000,000 registered voters will take inspiration and perspiration.
Shneiderman, Ben. Universal Usability (2000). Books>Usability>Accessibility>Universal Usability
#18436
Universal Usability: Introduction and Definition
The goal of universal access to information and communications services is compelling. Enthusiastic networking innovators, business leaders, and government policy makers see opportunities and benefits from widespread usage. But even if they succeed and the economies of scale bring low costs, computing researchers will still have much work to do. They will have to deal with the difficult question: How can information and communications services be made usable for every citizen? Designing for experienced frequent users is difficult enough, but designing for a broad audience of unskilled users is a far greater challenge. Scaling up from a listserv for 100 software engineers to 100,000 schoolteachers to 100,000,000 registered voters will take inspiration and perspiration.
Shneiderman, Ben. Universal Usability. Articles>Usability>Accessibility>Universal Usability
