I am sure I am not that only one who thought that when they had their own children they would never say or do some of the things that their parents did. However, I still found myself uttering the classic ‘because I told you so’ when I had run out of patience providing explanations. Since my children are now grown up, this was some time ago. But I was reminded of things our parents used to say when selecting the papers for this issue of Behaviour and Information Technology. One of my mother's sayings, which always perplexed me was ‘remember the starving Chinese’ when I was reluctant to clear my plate. I can only assume that China was going through a bad patch foodwise in the early nineteen fifties but I could never understand why leaving food on my plate was going to make matters worse for them. Nor for that matter how eating it all up was going to help, although it has left me with a lifelong aversion to waste which I guess is no bad thing.
One of the other areas where she struggled to instill the correct behaviour concerned behaving properly and avoiding being rude to other people. It was one of her comments about rudeness which trigged my thoughts about the first group of papers in this issues.
Don't be rude
Another of her sayings which I remember well but never quite understood fully was that it was rude to point. I am still not sure why. Although I believe the concern only arose when it was a person being pointed at, I still never fully appreciated the problem. It always seemed quite a convenient and natural way of communicating and the advances in gesture recognition systems would seem to bear this out.
However, there seem to be two recurring problems with touch recognition systems which result from the fact that fingers are quite big and they get dirty. Hertzum and Hornbæk, from Roskilde and Copenhagen Universities respectively, report intriguing experiments on an innovative touch pad device called Touchgrid which responds to the user tapping in a cell on the pad. Their experiments showed that the recursive mapping approach adopted by Touchgrid enabled users to achieve far higher input rates although error rates also increased. The device was preferred by users and the authors suggest that the device could be useful in a number of applications where speed is important.
Silence can also be seen as rude or at least as indicating disapproval in a social setting. But Panteli and Fineman from the School of Management at the University of Bath in the UK discuss how silence from members of virtual teams need not have a negative effect on team performance and team relationships. They argue that silence can actually reinforce the virtual environment in a positive way. It is certainly not always rude.
However, the last paper in this section does indeed deal with rudness, in particular the kind of impolite behaviour we are expected to tolerate from software. Brain Whitworth from the New Jersey Institute of Technology argues that politeness is a key yet often overlooked attribute for successful software. He suggests four requirements for polite software which include respecting users choice, disclosing itself, offering useful choices and remembering past choices. He illustrates his argument with numerous familiar examples including the infamous ‘Mr Clippy’ which is rude to the point of irritation for many users. He goes on to explain how polite software might be supported at the operating system level.
Don't get old
Aging is one of those things which we believe mainly happens to other people. But, every so often, we are forced to accept reality and come face to face with our own diminishing faculties (yes, sadly, I am talking about myself). However, sometimes the effects of aging are less obvious and predictable than just taking longer to perform a task or developing a liking for crystal glassware. Kallien and Rvaja from the Helsinki School of Economics, Knowledge Media Laboratory found that age made a difference in how their participants felt the reverse. Since speech output is being used increasingly in computer systems as the prime method of communication results have implications for those who want to ensure their systems match the characteristics of their users.
More predictably, Ziefle and Bay from the Department of Psychology at RWTH Aachen University found that older users performed significantly more poorly than younger users when confronted with a complex mobile phone. In fact both older and younger users performed much better in terms of effectiveness and efficiency when using the simpler phone. It certainly makes me wonder why we still fall for the trap of thinking that more complex products are somehow better – no matter what age we are.
Don't focus on technology
The last paper in this issue is a timely reminder that it is all too easy to focus on the technology and forget other issues – whether it is the ease of use for the individual or the effective management of information systems for business. Booth and Philips from the School of Management and Economics at Queen's University in Belfast argue that planning, alignment and managerial responsibility are the most fundamental issues in information systems management. They argue that failing to address these issues properly underlies why many organisations do not reap the expected (and indeed promised) benefits from their investment in information systems.
Tom Stewart
Systems Concepts