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This forum addresses conceptual, methodological, and professional issues that arise in UX's continuing effort to have a positive impact by contributing robust information about users to product planning and design. --- David Siegel and Susan Dray, Editors

This forum addresses conceptual, methodological, and professional issues that arise in the UX field's continuing effort to contribute robust information about users to product planning and design. --- David Siegel and Susan Dray, Editors

This forum is dedicated to maximizing the success of HCI practitioners within the frenetic world of product and service design. It focuses on UX strategy approaches, leadership, management techniques, and above all the challenge of bringing HCI to peer-level status with longstanding business disciplines such as marketing and engineering. --- Daniel Rosenberg, Editor

Evaluation and usability as a practice area has diversified its approaches, broadened the spectrum of UX issues it addresses, and extended its contribution into deeper levels of product-development decision making. This forum addresses conceptual, methodological, and professional issues that arise in the field's continuing effort to contribute robust information about users to product planning and design. David Siegel and Susan Dray, Editors

Evaluation and usability as a practice area has diversified its approaches, broadened the spectrum of UX issues it addresses, and extended its contribution into deeper levels of product-development decision making. This forum addresses conceptual, methodological, and professional issues that arise in the field's continuing effort to contribute robust information about users to product planning and design. David Siegel and Susan Dray, Editors

It is a mantra of our profession that any search for strictly technical solutions that do not take the human and organizational elements into account is doomed to failure. This becomes especially interesting when it is borne out in an inherently technical realm, populated with “techies.” In this article, we share highlights from a field study of IT security at three companies. In the winter and spring of 2005, we spent four hours interviewing and doing contextual inquiry with each of 30 IT professionals at three companies. All of these participants, who ranged from frontline IT professionals to the top level of IT management, had some role in IT security. For some, security was a main focus while for others it was a peripheral aspect of their responsibilities. The companies included

i n t e r a c t i o n s . . . m a y + j u n e 2 0 0 3 Many HCI professionals spend a good deal of their time proselytizing about user-centered design (UCD). Often, attempts at persuasion involve or even hinge on cost justification. Developing a comprehensive model of costs and benefits can be quite complex, depending on how many factors you try to include, such as the time value of money, indirect and direct effects, and tangible and intangible effects. (See Bias and Mayhew [1], still probably the best collection of articles on cost justification of usability, and unfortunately not “unnecessary” 10 years later as they optimistically predicted.) Because of this complexity, and because it may be difficult to get real numbers to prepare a comprehensive costbenefit analysis, in practice, UCD champions often use simplified pro forma analyses to relate “sample” expenditures on UCD activities to particular estimated financial benefits—a reduction in support calls, reduced training time, reduced errors, and increased productivity, to name a few. Of course, the variables emphasized depend on the nature of the product, for example, whether it is intended for internal or external use. If we approach these efforts at persuasion with the attitude that the value of usability is self-evident, it can be frustrating when business decision makers don’t seem to understand. We can lapse into viewing this attitude as irrational or politically motivated resistance to change. We need to recognize that these arguments can fail to persuade an intelligently skeptical person for several fundamental reasons. Cost-justification arguments often use reasonable, but hypothetical numbers, which may have low credibility. In addition, the analyses may be anecdotal, and although case studies can be persuasive, an audience may not be convinced that their current situation is analogous, especially if they are initially skeptical. We would love to be able to show that UCD increases sales and market share, but the impact of UCD on sales is difficult to quantify and often indirect. The nature of the product, the product space, and the balance of all other factors that influence buying behavior complicate how much UCD affects sales. This complexity can make it difficult to convincingly predict specific sales improvements from specific usability changes. It also can make it show retrospectively that actual sales improvements bu si ne ss

Over the years, this column has explored how user-centered design (UCD) fits into the design and development process in the business world. In the context of traditional practices, UCD is often viewed as an added cost, one that has at most long-range benefits. Of course, when a conflict is perceived between what is needed to maximize long-range value and what is needed to successfully meet urgent near-term challenges, the latter usually wins out. Therefore, practitioners of UCD tend to search for examples of how the UCD approach can provide a model for leadership in design and development that integrates the short- and long-term perspectives. This article explores the role that the "demo version" (henceforth referred to simply as the "demo") plays in the product lifecycle, its impact on design, and how UCD can help manage this impact.

"Namespaces" have been implemented in some APL dialects, to reduce name scope and avoid name conflicts. Other implementations, including APL+WIN, do not yet support such a feature. This is an unofficial proposal for the design and implementation of such a feature. The design is, in the author's opinion, an improvement on those already implemented. It is presented in the hope of stimulating discussion, which might lead to further improvements in the proposal, and the decision, by language implementers, to adopt such an improved proposal.