INFORMATION INTERACTIONS - Human-Computer Interaction and Management Information Systems: Foundations - page 6

activities and agents. Handbooks of design guidelines have been proposed over the last two decades,
but few, if any, have had significant impact on practice, partly because guideline application is so
context-dependent. Indeed, a typical design exercise for HCI students in my classes is to develop
a highly unusable interface that conforms to such guidelines, a task that often proves quite easy to
complete. Obviously there is no silver bullet here, but it seems that one potentially fruitful area for
exploration, beyond users and interfaces, is the concept of information, wherein clarification of its
nature and purpose for human activities might indicate more fundamental issues of relevance to
both fields.
INFORMATION, NOT INTERACTION, AS A THE BASIS OF A
SHARED PERSPECTIVE
Although the term “information” is ubiquitous, its definition as a meaningful concept in research
on systems design remains somewhat vague. But how can this be? For researchers in MIS, infor-
mation is a resource to be managed systematically to serve a common purpose; its impact on
organizations and users can be reliably measured (e.g., McLeod and Schell, 2004). The emphasis
therefore is on resource management, and, in particular, on creating better tools to support this
activity. Travica (1999) argues that the use of information in this field tends to reduce the term to
whatever technological application is being discussed, rendering it machine-processed data imbued
with a business purpose. The emphasis of the field therefore is more on the processing, not on the
concept, of information.
Within HCI, the term “information” is rarely, if ever, dealt with systematically. By its very
name, HCI supposes that humans are using computers, and whatever it is that computers traffic in
presumably defines information sufficiently well for this purpose. But the picture is more com-
plicated than this. The term “interaction” in HCI may in fact be a historical anomaly. In early
work, the acronym “HCI” was often taken to refer to the “human-computer interface” (for a thor-
ough historical overview of the field up to the turn of the century, see Shackel 1997). By the 1980s
“interaction” had replaced “interface” in common usage, even though many people remained uncom-
fortable with the idea that humans and computers ever interacted (Suchman, 1987). Neverthe-
less, computers were seen as information processors and the goal of HCI research was to help
ease the processing of information and to render computers more usable for their intended user
population.
But information as a concept still has only vague status within HCI and MIS, oddly enough.
Despite the term's prominence, reflected in titles and publications, critical treatment of the infor-
mation concept is not the norm. The most recent edition of the Handbook of Human-Computer
Interaction (Helander et al., 1997), a standard reference within the field, contains multiple listings
of the term in its index, but these are references to other areas where the term itself is employed
conjointly, such as “information visualization,” “information superhighway,” “information
retrieval,” or “information filtering.” Information alone is not defined, and certainly is not a cen-
tral focus of writings on HCI. For HCI researchers, the goal of their work is more to understand
how devices that manipulate and present “information” can be designed for ease of use; this has
led to an emphasis on usability, with its attendant focus on efficiency of user performance. Yet
information is central to HCI since the very goal of design is to create tools that get out of the way
of users and their tasks, to create transparency in their workings so as to facilitate smoother inter-
action. A similar exercise in a current MIS textbook by Laudon and Laudon (2003) also lacks a
detailed definition of the concept; indeed, the index to the 8th edition of this well-regarded text
mentions the term “information” by itself only twice.