Editorial

They say that time passes more quickly as we get older. I can certainly confirm that. It does not seem like twenty five years ago that Behaviour and Information Technology first hit the news stands. Well, of course, BIT has never actually been on the news stands. We are not that kind of publication. Our mission is to publish peer reviewed, quality papers which are of archival value – that is they become recognised as part of the state of the art of the human aspects of computing. Nonetheless, timeliness is important and although we expect the papers in BIT to be of enduring interest, everyone, authors in particular, would like their papers published as quickly as possible.

Some journals have so few papers that there is very little delay between acceptance and publication. In the early stages of BIT's life, we too had few papers in the pipeline. But as BIT's reputation and impact have grown, so we have a steady flow of papers ready and awaiting publication.

I am therefore delighted to be able to announce that BIT is now able to take advantage of Preview, Taylor & Francis' online first publication service (please see http://www.tandf.co.uk/preview/ and select forthcoming titles. BIT will soon be fully accesible and articles will be available online. This offers readers immediate access to key research findings, without waiting for the printed journal to appear. Preview articles have been fully peer-reviewed, revised, and accepted for publication, and have been processed through copy-editing, typesetting, and correction into their final form. A preview article is therefore effectively an advance version of the article that will ultimately appear in the print and online editions. Each preview article is allocated a Digital Object Identifier (DOI – www.doi.org), rendering it trackable and citable. Upon formal publication, the preview version of the article is withdrawn, and it appears in the online and print editions with full volume, issue, and page span bibliographic data, but also, importantly, retaining the DOI. I am sure authors will greatly appreciate this new facility.

You will also have noticed that we have a new cover design for our 25^th volume and the number of pages has also been increased by about eight pages an issue – effectively another paper.

I assume everyone will welcome the increase in size but the cover design may not appeal to all. I rather like it but when it comes to aesthetic choices, we know that there are huge individual differences. I hope, like me, you will still find that it is the contents that matter.

The final new thing this year is that Taylor and Francis have agreed to put up a prize for this years best paper. The prize will be Taylor & Francis books of the author's choice to the value of €200 plus a free personal print subscription to BIT for one year, together with a certificate. We will also put an announcement of the winner in the journal and on the website and make the paper free to read online for 30 days and send out a SARA alert.

We have already agonised over whether it should be for a paper published this year – in which case many of the entrants are already in process – or for the best paper submitted this year. In the best spirit of compromise, I have decided that both should qualify so there is plenty of time to write the definitive paper that has been bubbling in your consciousness.

One of the biggest changes over the past 25 years (and I will be writing more about these later in the year) is the proliferation of the world wide web. This has changed the face of computing and has dramatically broadened the range of people who use computers routinely. It has also been responsible for a huge upsurge in interest in usability. Indeed, one of life's minor irritations is hearing some of the younger usability practitioners talk as if usability was only invented a couple of years ago. However, it is certainly true that bad usability is much more obviously bad for business on the web when a potential e-commerce customer can shop elsewhere in a click. We have all suffered from bad usability in video recorders yet how many of us fall for the misleading promises when we buy the next one? So it is entirely appropriate that the first section of this issue of Behaviour and Information Technology contains two papers on web related usability issues.

World wide web usability

One of the most noticeable impacts of the web has been the ease with which we can now buy and sell products and services internationally with little more effort or complexity than local purchases. This could lead us to think that e-commerce is the same the world over. Hwang, Jung and Salvendy from Purdue University in the US, Dongseo University in South Korea and Tsinghua University in China have compared the results which Lightner et al (2002) found in Turkish and US surveys with their own survey of Korean shoppers. They found significant cross-national differences between these groups and use this information to develop some guidelines for improving international sites which want to attract Korean consumers.

In a similar vein, Manuel Sánchez-Franco from the University of Seville in Spain has modelled the differences between males and females in terms of web acceptance and usage. Despite the limitations of this study, which the author recognises and discusses in the paper, his findings do suggest gender differences in patterns of use and acceptance. Of course, these do not imply that such differences are inevitable and he discusses how the perception of computing as being more masculine in some societies can play a part in such differences. Nonetheless, his paper provides food for thought for those who wish to tailor their offerings to suit different customer groups.

Usability in other contexts – it's not just the web

As I pointed out earlier in this editorial, despite what some young usability professionals think, usability has been a consideration in other areas of technology for a very long time – although not always called by that name. The navigation and control of ships have been at the leading edge of technology for centuries. They have always been complex tasks and the technology they have spun off range from accurate clocks to effective telescopes. Nowadays, much of the technology transfer is in the opposite direction and office type computer systems are increasingly appearing on board. When they are used for office-type functions on board ship, that is not a great problem although the fact that the ‘office’ may be subject to rough seas clearly has an impact on workplace design. But when they are used as part of the control and navigation systems, the kinds of interface which we all use in the office can be problematical on the bridge. Eva Olsson and Anders Jansson from the Department of Information Technology at Upsala University in Sweden report a detailed study on the work that officers do on the bridge of high speed ferries and their information and control needs. The most significant issue concerns the lack of integration between systems which clearly places an unnecessary and potentially dangerous load on busy bridge officers.

One of the surprising aspects of modern technology is the way it can leapfrog what one might regard as a normal development curve. For example, there are areas in Africa where users have jumped straight to mobile phones without going through the phase of using landlines. Thatcher, Mahlangu and Zimmerman from the University of Witwatersand and Absolute Systems in South Africa report on a similar development to allow functionally illiterate customers to use automated teller machines (ATMs) using icons rather than text. There were a number of problems with the study which the authors explore but nonetheless, they had a number of very useful findings. One which struck me as important was that even illiterate users can benefit from icons with text labels rather than need a purely icon based interface. The icons appeared to encourage these users to persist with the task. This is an example of the kind of non-intuitive usability finding which can only be discovered by testing with real users.

And finally – a short experiment

The final paper in this issue describes some rather neat experiments investigating the effects of the width of an object on selection time. Shawn Farris from Convergis and Brian Johnson and Keith Jones from Texas Tech have developed some width guidelines for rectangular objects with penetrable and impenetrable borders for example scroll bars. Their results suggest that width manipulations did not influence selection time and so they conclude that designers could use very thin objects with impenetrable borders without slowing selection time