Over on the new CACM blog, researcher Tessa Lau has an interesting post on three common misconceptions that folks have about HCI. I recommend reading the full article, but I would like to call attention to her provocative opening statement (emphasis mine):
I come to the field of HCI via a background in AI, having learned the hard way that good interaction design trumps smart algorithms in the quest to deploy software that has an impact on millions of users. Currently a researcher at IBM’s Almaden Research Center, I lead a team that is exploring new ways of capturing and sharing knowledge about how people interact with the web. We conduct HCI research in designing and developing new interaction paradigms for end-user programming.
One of my biggest grievances with web scale search engines is that they have made the assumption that smart algorithms (or, at least, simple algorithms trained with enough data to be made smart) are more important than good interaction design.
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