Collaborating on the Interface Design: A Response

Michael Parks, University of Houston
[10 December 1996]

This is written in response to Blake Ives 11 September 1996 piece depicting his view of the MISQ Discovery collaboration between myself, Blake and Rick Watson. A bit of family history helps set the stage for my part in the design:

In 1095, one of my great grandfathers, Baron de Kari left for the crusades and never returned. In 1387, Sir John Cary became Chief Baron of the Exchequer. He was banished to Ireland by Henry IV and died broke. In 1471, his great-grandson Sir William Cary was beheaded by Edward IV. By 1530, the Cary boys had set aside politics and knighting and become drapers, silkmen and textile merchants in Bristol England. In the 1640s, Miles Cary immigrated to Virginia, got elected Escheator-General of Virginia and was killed by the Dutch in a naval battle off Hampton Roads in 1667. Miles should have stuck to hanging fabrics and stayed out of politics.

Through some quirk of genetic memory, my mother, grandmother and aunt began a home-based interior decorating business in the 1950's dealing primarily in custom made draperies. Strange how 150 years in the cloth business gets in your genes.

I spent my childhood Saturdays working with my dad as part of the installation team. During the week, we would walk around the piles of fabric my maternal seamstresses were stitching together. On Saturday mornings Dad and went to the client's home to install the rods, draperies and cornice boards. I thought this is what everybody did on Saturdays.

The process employed by the matrons in our family business was very typical for designers -- go see the client and ask what they want. This "requirements planning" was always left to my mother's imagination. Client comments like "Oh Martha, you'll find something great to do with this room. Just pick it out an I'll pay for it" were common. I found this reliance on Mom's expertise quite remarkable. She could actually take burlap feed bags and hang them so that it looked great. She has that eye for color and composition and could spot a uneven curtain rod at fifty paces.

The strange part of this design process always occurred just before we left the initial client home visit. The kicker was always something like "Oh yes, Martha, do whatever you think will look nice -- BUT -- I want to keep Grandpa's Barco recliner in the living room."

A Barco recliner is a double hinged chair whose sitting position can be adjusted from vertical to horizontal with a flip of a lever. Grandpa's Barco recliner was always a big faded green monstrosity with cotton stuffing bursting through the ripped seams, a broken recliner lever and the whole chair listing about 10 degrees to starboard. Everything else could go -- but the Grandpa's recliner had to stay!

We information systems designers might refer to such design constraints as either a "mandatory feature" or a "legacy component." To Mom it was a headache. I could see her enthusiasm drop when she saw the Barco. I knew she had visions of a Michaelangelo-like job on the Sistine Chapel -- art without constraints. And just like Michaelangelo, the vision got more difficult when the pope said the Barco lounger had to stay in the chapel.

Pope Blake began discussing an e-journal early in the ISWorldNet creation process (about 24 months ago). The e-journal for MIS was and is (at least to me) the primary reason to do all the other things. Directories, mailing lists, interest groups and such are the staples of ISWorldNet. These kinds of WEB-based goodies were certain to be the reasons people would come back to the ISWorldNet site initially. Blake has always been concerned about momentum. and keeping people involved. His skill at manipulating the organizational parameters of ISWorldNet are the only reason we have had some positive reception so far. But the reason for ISWorldNet mostly lies with the creation of the e-journal. And gotten the basics offerings on ISWorldNet up and running, it was clearly time to start on the e-journal.

My initial prototypes for MISQ Discovery appeared on my web pages in March 1995 (nearly 18 months before the real thing appeared). Blake leads you to believe that this happened in thirty days. Well, maybe round 3 happened in thirty days. But, the first two rounds took a year and a half.

1. From March 1995 see the prototypes for Discovery:

   From the top page:

   

   See the full site at: www.cba.uh.edu/~parks/mqd00000.html

   This site shows what could be done. None of the image maps work. They are just prototype images. My design rationale was:

   1. Quick navigation: One click to the article. Thus there is a rolling list of articles with the most recent at the top. No issues. No volumes. Publish them as we get them! Up the electronic revolution -- no paper!

   2. Cycle time: (See the submission panels at the site above) The object was to give a quick electronic turn for the authors; track the submission; post the reviews and editor decisions on the WEB; and display the system performance as it happens. One could also conceive of tracking reviewer performance to the nearest minute. But the idea really rested with a quick turnaround -- from submission to a publishing decision. All WEB and NO paper.

   3. No rules for the article: There was to be NO format specifications for articles. Authors developed the article as a WEB page(s) then sent us the URL for review. The e-journal top page just linked to the article at the author's site. Thus, the author/WEBhead is free to exploit the technology as much as creativity allows. Design by anarchy.

   RESPONSE TO THE DESIGN:

   This site got a little action. Artistically, some liked it -- others did not. From those outside of ISWorldNet, the issue was not the quality of artistic expression but conceptually "...the very idea itself." Though everyone I asked (mostly professors) knew everything there is to know about journals, this format seemed to bother them. A WEB-based e-journal seemed to strike fear into their hearts. It was like the invention of the airplane or radio or television must have been to our parents generation -- astonishing!

   Whatever the pleasure or complaint, I noticed that though the discussions seemed to be on details:

   How would you make a hardcopy?
   How would you make it secure?
   As an author, would I be required to respond to the reader's e-mail

   Their heads tended to tilt to the left when talking about it. Like the dog in the old RCA print ad who is staring at the Victrola playing "his master's voice" with that quizzical look. As they watch the pieces on their screen, I am standing behind them in their office which has several hundred pounds of journals neatly arranged on their shelves. The rest of the paper in their office is research projects, papers in progress, papers accepted, reprints and correspondences. Eventually, they came to the realization that there is no journal, no paper, no manuscripts, no correspondence -- just pixels. Their office would be empty -- except for a few student files.

   Then begins their diatribe about what you CAN'T do with a e-journal:

   Take it to the beach
   Use a highlight marker to note the good parts
   Curl up with it in front of a fireplace
   Use it to wrap fish

   But at the heart of the objections was the requirement that they had to change. They would have to learn new skills, modify their behaviors and clean out their office.

   My general reaction to these comments (which all which began with: ...you can't do thus-and-so...) was to say:

   If you can't do it (i.e., create WEB-based content), then you will probably object to the idea of changing the academic rules.

   This technology inadequacy would be acceptable if our discipline was history or literature. But we are all computer geeks. We should embrace the idea of a computer connected society even if it is as small as our own discipline. The WEB is our turf and we should be leading the charge.

   The Barco lounger in this first design is the "lack of format for the authors". Gotta have it -- sez the pope.

2. Design from October 1995 see:

   Here the top panel (a graphic only):

   

   The real thing is at:

   http://www.cba.uh.edu/~parks/mqd.html

   I did this version of the truth in response to the need for a structure for authors to write around. My design rationale is just a simple technology extension of the first design.Then you get:

   1. Frames: The ultimate navigation tool. Since the frames are independent, I could always have the navigation components visible and operational. At the top page, the left side of the frame holds the rolling article list (a variation of the first design -- no buttons just clickable text) and the main menu. Inside any article the left side holds the table of contents with navigation menus always visible. Neat -- works well!

      The frame approach is an extension of the basic hypertext structure. For simple HTML pages, the browser supplies navigation in several ways:

      • BACK button (go to the previous HTML page)
      • FORWARD button (go forward in the history list)
      • SCROLL BARS vertically and horizontally IF the page content size exceeds the current window size
      • user supplied links (to other pages)
      • user supplied links inside the current page (e.g., TOP and BOTTOM links)

      Most pages only use these tools. Frames allows customization of the page to create more elaborate navigation. In the context of an e-journal this has a particular meaning from the design view. We know specifically that:

      • The journal is an index of articles (inter-article navigation)
      • An article is a linear sequence of content (intra-article navigation)

      Both of the visible frame components shown above:

      • The always-visible higher level view (i.e., the Article-list frame on the top page and the Table-of-Contents frame in the articles)
      • The always-visible top/botton/previous/next frame

      provide a visible context for navigation. Knowing "where I am" in large part is defined by "where you have been" and "where you can go." Having these components visually available to the user has a great comforting effect.

      I am of the opinion that the success of Lotus 1-2-3 was based on the navigation metaphor -- not the functional ability of the spreadsheet. At that time several spreadsheet options were available (Visicalc, Context's MBA, IFPS, etc.). But in Lotus 1-2-3, the top line menu options provided a quick way to move around the functionality. The rest of those introductory spreadsheets retained that command-line requirement of having to remember how-to-thus-and-so. "Always visible vertical and horizontal navigation" made it easy to use.

      This design is a significant improvement on the simple links approach. But it is a mess to code in HTML. I even modified the ISWorldNet Engine Room to operate on frames. See the frames lesson my Engine Room discussion for more particulars on frames.

   2. Add some punchy things: a gif89a logo, new DISCOVERY typography, and white space for readability and contrast.

   RESPONSE TO DESIGN:

   There were two Barco loungers in this design. First, Pope Rick and Pope Blake said that the frames grab too much screen real estate. On a 640x480 screen, the amount of visible text is limited in the main text window. I lost all the ensuing e-mail battles on screen real estate. Blake claims his 640x480 portable couldn't handle the frame approach. His complaints have been lessened to some degree since he came home from Ireland to a new big monitor. But their arguement is still valid. We are stuck in a 640x480x256 color world for a while.

   Secondly, the MISQuarterly-maroon color legacy is a Barco lounger.

   During the October 1995 and October 1996, the design lay barren. ISWorldNet plodded along. Blake and I both were on leave of absences and Rick and his co-authors got the initial content up and runnning.

   As Blake picks up the 30 day wonder story, we have a single HTML formatted article which we will use as a template (Rick et al's content and Blake's and Rick's layout work). This left Blake impatiently waiting for me to do the art.

   Jeez, a Barco lounger!

3. The current design (as of October 1996)

   "We need logos, we need text pointers, we need graphics for the departments, blah, blah, blah..." sez Pope Blake. Although incredibly polite, Blake can be incredibly persistent.

   My delivery problem -- for which I take complete responsibility -- is based on the constrained artistic problem of unifying the typography of MISQuarterly, ISWorldNet, and DISCOVERY in maroon.

   The actual solution was anchored in Blake's phone calls from every pub in Ireland and England. The James-Joyce-stream-of-consciousness design methodology go like this:

   DISCOVERY -- like a...uhhh...an inventor, scientist,...uhhh...an EXPLORER!
   Every EXPLORER has a...uhhhh.....map, ship, compass, ...uhhh...TELESCOPE!
   
   So we are DISCOVERING/EXPLORING/TELESCOPING,...then writing it down.
   TELESCOPES and QUILL PENS. Eureka!

   Look around -- write it down!
   

   Look around -- write it down.

   The animation is obvious. An explorer looks around and writes it down.

   Captain Cook, Captain Hook, ...

   Oh yeah!

   When Captain Billy Bones chases Black Dog out of the Admiral Ben Bow Inn in the novel Treasure Island, the killing stroke of his cutlass is thwarted when it strikes the "Admiral Benbow" sign hanging over the door of the inn...

   Black Dog is reprieved. So am I.

   An image came to mind. The art below is from my copy of the 1943 Harper & Brothers' edition of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island.
   
   
   

   The artwork by Louis Rhead is fantastic. This set of ten books came as the purchase bonus with the 1947 Encyclopedia Brittanica (my father's version of a birth gift for his newborn son -- most get baseball gloves -- I got the books). With this image all the rest was easy.

   We needed a Captain who looks around and writes it down. The "Captain" animation took most of the work time. The work was done in Autodesk's 3DStudio. This package is terrific. A discounted student version is available that has all the parts. The package works on Windows platforms. The captain is composed of some color blobs and linked together as a reticulated object.

   
   The Captain. He is beautiful.

   After the pub sign animation was created, I built the pub with street signs attached to the walls as the navigation tools. Variations of this iconography appear throughout DISCOVERY.

   RESPONSE TO THE THIRD DESIGN:

   Please send them along. E-mail Parks