Paper Reading #3

Reference
Title: Hard-To-Use Interfaces Considered Beneficial (Some of the Time)
Author: YannRiche, Nathalie Henry Riche, Petra Isenberg, and Anastasia Bezerianos

Summary
The premise of the article states that while intuitive interface designs are explored regularly and extensively by researchers in the HCI domain, there is little work done regarding the potential benefits of a system that is more difficult for the user. The paper outlines two cases where they feel this is an issue. In the first, multiple users (see above picture) attempted to use the same computer at the same time using different mice. This naturally resulted in communication between users to resolve the issue of everyone attempting to control the pointer location themselves. In the second case was a study on elderly people. The individuals were instructed in the use of more recent technologies such as email in several workshops over an extended duration. However, following the end of the series of workshops, the subjects involved were found to still prefer older methods of writing letters as they credited the extra time taken to write them as giving them a higher emotion value. This argument was then interpreted as a point in favor of hard-to-use interfaces.

Discussion
I thought both cases outlined in this paper were highly irrelevant. In the first, the issue of multiple pointers could have easily been remedied by a better interface design. For example, the users could have had an interface where one user had control and could then pass control to another user. This would still facilitate communication, but without any of the initial confusion and learning process. An argument could be made that in the original case at least all users had equal access, but I think this is largely irrelevant as well, as giving all users equal access without the ensuing communication reduces the system to a state in which it is largely undesirable to use. To reiterate this, in the first scenario no one got to use the computer until the users communicated, in my scenario one user would get to use it initially, and then following communication the other users could also use the system. The end result is the same, but the second scenario is purely superior from an objective perspective in the initial phase.

The second case is a relation of the sentimental attachment that people attach to an arbitrary process. This study subjectively and intentionally picked a group of subject that they suspecting would prove their assertion. For example I could conduct a study on a population in an underdeveloped country and find that people prefer hearth fires to a centralized heating system in their houses because the former holds sentimental significance for them. What this really proves, is that people have an aversion to change, and more specifically, that this trend increases as they grow older. There are any number of studies that have been conducted regarding this issue, and I am certain that nearly all of them point to a correlation between age and resistance to change. Again, I feel that the authors intentionally targeted this correlation to draw a conclusion on a larger population that did not have the same constraints.