rahrahfeminista
Tuesday, July 08, 2003
A snippet from a Nielsen AlertBox article:
The Future of Corporate Research
It's striking that only two of the 12 research medals went to universities. I think this is because university departments seem to view the best HCI research as both too mundane and too resource intensive. Many academics disdain research topics that are closely connected to real-world needs. For proof, look no further than the appalling lack of Web usability research. There are more papers on unworkable, esoteric 3-D browsers than on how hundreds of millions of people use the biggest real-time collaborative system ever built.
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This is my problem with HCI research in academia. The kinds of gadgets and permutatrons (I make this term up to mean gadgets that seem more the fruits of permutation than of problem-solving creativity.) there are so many papers about don't really compel me.
But the fact that Nielsen is tuned into it means that others are as well, and maybe the tides will begin shifting.
