Déjà vu

I’ve just read an interview between Jared Spool and Hagen Rivers and I’m feeling pretty depressed by it (even though the transcript was brimful of laughter!). I know that this interview was a thinly disguised advert for a report that they’re trying to sell (someone should do a book on ‘Salesmen and Showmen in HCI’) but that wasn’t what was so awful. It was the content of the report that upset me.

I must come clean here and say I have not read the report. Frankly, if it has in it what these two say is in it, I never will. It seems to concern an insight that Ms Rivers has had that the structure of Web applications can mostly be described as a set of ‘hubs’ and ‘interviews’. A ‘hub’ is just a page from which you can reach several other pages, and an ‘interview’ is a linked sequence of pages. Now I expect most of you are saying something like ‘Well, duh!’ or ‘Surely there has to be more to it than that!’ – which is pretty much what I said too.

The fact is that anyone who has been in this business for five minutes, or has ever used a Web application for that matter, will see that this is a statement of the blindingly obvious. Yet, for some reason, Ms Rivers believes this to be a profound insight and so does Jared Spool. I hate to sound like a bitter old fart but this was the kind of insight that was old hat more than 20 years ago, in the early days of hypertext, before the Web was even invented. I published a paper back then describing metrics for analysing a number of common navigational structures (and rather more sophisticated ones than the ‘hub’ and ‘interview’ structures that have just been ‘discovered’ – see Canter, D., Rivers, R. and Storrs, G. (1985). “Characterizing User Navigation Through Complex Data Structures”, Behaviour and Information Technology, 4(2),93-102.) If Ms Rivers or Mr Spool had bothered to look, they would have found many other papers on the subject too. In fact, a moderately large literature on hypertext navigation and structure that makes this exciting new report of theirs look rather silly.

If this was an isolated incident, it wouldn’t be so bad but the Web is full of ‘gurus’ like this who are discovering things that were well known and even well understood may years ago. God knows, I’m no scholar but I get the impression that these ‘experts’ never open a journal to see what has been done before. They just have their amazing ‘insights’ and splurge them out as if it was news.

Human-computer interaction (oh sorry, we’re calling it ‘interaction design ‘ this year) has always been an almost theory-free zone but there are people out there doing proper studies and seriously trying to accumulate understanding. The least we could do is look at their findings from time to time. Isaac Newton famously commented that, if he saw a little farther than others, it was because he was standing on the shoulders of giants. Well, there are very few giants in this field but there are plenty of midgets we could be standing on if we were really interested in seeing a bit more.

All-in-all, the discipline could do with a bit more Newtonesque humility and a little less guruism.