Donald Norman (He conceptualized and coined the term User Experience Design)

(Sorry for the delay in answering. I'm traveling a lot: right now I'm in Germany)
---

"The moment you design an intelligent and efficient technology to take over a manual process, it is the paradigm of User Inexperience Design."

Very funny. I like that. User Inexperience.

One interesting question: What is the difference between "deskilling"
(through automation, say) and "User Inexperience"?

A wonderful concept.
Thank you for sharing it with me.

Don

Ben Shneiderman

Dear Dinesh Katre,

Thanks for including me in your list of HCI gurus. I appreciate the recognition, and continue to work hard to promote HCI and user centered design.

I hope you might be willing to focus some attention on two topics near to my heart:
1) universal usability - you already address this in your discussion of pluralistic usability but might want to link to www.universalusability.org In that spirit, maybe you should cover www.worldusabilityday.org (Nov 14)

2) the growing theme of creativity support tools maybe you could promote our conference
www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/CC2007

Your writings are important as they help spread interest in our field and raise awareness of the importance of usability.

Best wishes.. Ben Shneiderman

Ben Shneiderman
Dept of Computer Science 301-405-2680
University of Maryland 301-405-6707 fax
College Park, MD 20742 www.cs.umd.edu/~ben

Message from HCI Guru Dr. Ben Shneiderman to Usability Practitioners of India
on the event of World Usability Day 14th Nov. 2006.

Aaron Marcus

Dear Dinesh:
Thanks for your patience. I apologize for my slow reply of more than one year. I finally had time to look through your paper about metaphors. It was interesting and provocative.

It also reminded me of a Japanese project called Friend 21, which took lace in 1989-1994 and was reported on at CHI in about 1994 or perhaps 1995. The Japanese Ministry of Trade funded projects of advanced technology, which included the development of metaphor management software. Essentially, it was assumed that applications in the future would be able to deliver information in a variety of metaphors, and the user, or someone else, could switch, as appropriate. The information that might have been delivered in the form of charts and reports might be reported by a simulated "television news announcer."

I have for a long time thought that India and China might produce new applications that derived their metaphors from local culture/history/literature. Your article points the way. What seemed intriguing was to view a list of these metaphors and religious/historical references, and to compare them with some standard Western approaches. Your comparison at the end of categories or types of metaphors was useful.

What I do not understand however, is the category of "no metaphor." I think this is not really possible in human-human communication. The only example I usually give of "communication" without metaphor is putting a lighted match under the hand. The hand "gets the message" without the mediation of metaphors; it is a simple matter of stimulus and response. In such situations, of direct linkage, we do not need metaphors. But this is limited "communication."

For more complex kinds of communication, we rely on metaphors all the time. Your article is a good introduction to thinking about Indian approaches to metaphor.
I hope you will continue your work. I look forward to a future meeting some day, somewhere.

Sincerely,
Aaron

(In my subsequent work 'no metaphor' category has been renamed as 'functional interface'.)