Here in the University, we have to put a timetable with our availability to see students up on our office door. It's one of the Good Things that we do, according to the BCS, and since they are coming any day now to hopefully re-accredit us, there has been a lot of activity in the corridors as various people rush up and down ensuring that all doors comply. We are also supposed to have a web page where our availability is also shown - embracing the internet, we are.

Now, some of the support for this is fine - any file called cal.htm or cal.html placed in one's web directory will be automatically linked to from our automatically generated staff web pages, so that it can be easily seen and accessed. All that we need to do is to generate this calendar web page - a simple grid with slots where we say that students can come and see us, or which are blocked out for administration (sorry, research). It should look something like the form shown below.

Time\Day / Monday / Tuesday / Wednesday / Thursday / Friday
0900-1000 / Lecture / Projects / MSc's
1000-1100 / First years / Lecture
1100-1200 / PhD's
…

Why am I labouring the description, you ask? Well, it's because of the email I got just before the beginning of term, which basically said that, because so many people were having trouble writing the html with all those tables and things, they'd written a program in C so that people could automatically create the web page. It then detailed the syntax: create a text file with data that was something like

109001000 "Lecture"

210001100 "First Years"

390001000 "Projects"

identifying the day first (numerically) then the timeslot and then the text to go into the field. Once created, you could send this file to his program and pipe the output into an html file - et voila, a simple black and white table in html.

I'm at first incredulous, then amused, then intrigued. Okay, so tables in html are a pain to create from scratch, but why would anyone go to the trouble of writing a program to parse an input file to create a web page when they could fire up Dreamweaver or FrontPage or Composer or some similar wysiwyg html editor? This program came from a theory guy, who doesn't write odd scripts for fun. It was done because it was thought to be genuinely useful to many people out there. It took me longer to read his email and understand the data description (it was more complex than I've outlined here) than it did to create the page from scratch in Dreamweaver.

After some investigation it appears to me that there are two factors at play here. One, some academics are not fully aware of the tools that exist out there to make this and related tasks much easier. We spend much of the time working at a level of fundamental principles, not high-level tools, and so the orbits of interest do not often coincide. Secondly, many of the tools are available under Windows (and Mac) platforms, and many hardcore computer scientists only use Unix. Now, it may be possible to find such things on that platform, but they are not an integral part of many people's installation. So, it may appear that the only way to use such a tool would be to use Microsoft, and there is the problem; there are many who are so inherently opposed to the MS platform that they'd rather spend their time writing C programs to do trivial things than run Windows.

What has this got to do with us, as HCI advocates? Firstly, we have clearly failed in getting the message of usability (or even of saving time) through to some parts of the population (e.g. theory academics). Secondly, and more significantly, much of what we do in GUI design is inseparably linked in many people's minds to Microsoft, and is not improved by that association. I have no axe to grind with MS; I may have disagreed with some of their business practices, but they have also contributed in positive ways. I have nothing against Unix, or Macs - I'm an OS agnostic, believing in the right OS for the job. The impact of our work should be to improve computer systems of all sorts - but if, even within a University where HCI is taught at many levels, there are substantial number of people having problems with both the underlying technologies and not using the tools to help them, our impact is clearly limited. Maybe people don’t think the tools are important; maybe they hate MS so much that anything HCI is simply feeding the beast; maybe we are not the strong advocates for usability and decent interaction that we thought we were.