Ben Shneiderman

Biography

Born in New York, Shneiderman, attended the Bronx High School of Science, and received a BS in Mathematics and Physics from the City College of New York in 1968. He then went on to study at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where he received an MS in Computer Science in 1972 and graduated with a PhD in 1973.

Shneiderman started his academic career at the State University of New York at Farmingdale in 1968 as Instructor at the Department of Data Processing. In the last year before his graduation he was Instructor at the Department of Computer Science of Stony Brook University (then called State University of New York at Stony Brook). In 1973 he was appointed Assistant Professor at the Indiana University, Department of Computer Science. In 1976 he moved to the University of Maryland. He started out as Assistant Professor in its Department of Information Systems Management, and became Associate Professor in 1979. In 1983 he moved to its Department of Computer Science as Associate Professor, and was promoted to full professor in 1989. In 1983 he was the Founding Director of its Human-Computer Interaction Lab, which he directed until 2000.

Shneiderman was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery in 1997, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2001, a Member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2010, an IEEE Fellow in 2012 and a Fellow of the National Academy of inventors in 2016. He is a ACM CHI Academy Member and received their Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001. He received the IEEE Visualization Career Award in 2012.

In 2002 his book Leonardo's Laptop: Human Needs and the New Computing Technologies was Winner of an IEEE-USA Award for Distinguished Contributions Furthering Public Understanding of the Profession. His 2016 book, The New ABCs of Research: Achieving Breakthrough Collaborations, encourages applied and basic research to be combined.

He received Honorary Doctorates from the University of Guelph (Canada) in 1995, the University of Castile-La Mancha (Spain) in 2010 , and the Stony Brook University in 2015.

Nassi–Shneiderman diagram

In the 1973 article "Flowchart techniques for structured programming" presented at a 1973 SIGPLAN meeting Isaac Nassi and Ben Shneiderman argued:

With the advent of structured programming and GOTO-less programming a method is needed to model computation in simply ordered structures, each representing a complete thought possibly defined in terms of other thoughts as yet undefined. A model is needed which prevents unrestricted transfers of control and has a control structure closer to languages amenable to structured programming. We present an attempt at such a model.

The new model technique for structured programming they presented has become known as the Nassi–Shneiderman diagram; a graphical representation of the design of structured software.

Flowchart research

In the 1970s Shneiderman continued to study programmers, and the use of flow charts. In the 1977 article "Experimental investigations of the utility of detailed flowcharts in programming" Shneiderman et al. summarized the origin and status quo of flowcharts in computer programming:

Flowcharts have been a part of computer programming since the introduction of computers in the 1940s. In 1947 Goldstein and von Neumann [7] presented a system of describing processes using operation, assertion, and alternative boxes. They felt that "coding begins with the drawing of flow diagram." Prior to coding, the algorithm had been identified and understood. The flowchart represented a high level definition of the solution to be implemented on a machine. Although they were working only with numerical algorithms, they proposed a programming methodology which has since become standard practice in the computer programming field.

Furthermore, Shneiderman had conducted experiments which suggested that flowcharts were not helpful for writing, understanding, or modifying computer programs. At the end of their 1977 paper, Shneiderman et al. concluded:

Although our original intention was to ascertain under which conditions detailed flowcharts were most helpful, our repeated negative results have led us to a more skeptical opinion of the utility of detailed flowcharts under modern programming conditions. We repeatedly selected problems and tried to create test conditions which would favor the flowchart groups, but found no statistically significant differences between the flowchart and non-flowchart groups. In some cases the mean scores for the non-flowchart groups even surpassed the means for the flowchart groups. We conjecture that detailed flowcharts are merely a redundant presentation of the information contained in the programming language statements. The flowcharts may even be at a disadvantage because they are not as complete (omitting declarations, statement labels, and input/output formats) and require many more pages than do the concise programming language statements.

Direct manipulation interface

These insights led Shneiderman to the development of the principles of direct manipulation interface design in 1982. His cognitive analysis and detailed description of the (1) continuous representation of the objects and actions, (2) rapid, incremental, and reversible actions, and (3) physical actions and gestures to replace typed commands enabled others to design a wide array of novel graphical user interfaces. He applied those principles to develop the user interface for highlighted clickable phrases in text, that became the "hot spots" or hyperlinks of the Web. Direct manipulation concepts led to touchscreen interfaces, dynamic query slides, and information visualization designs, such as treemaps.

Designing the User Interface, 1986

In 1986, he published the first edition (now on its sixth edition) of his book "Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction." Included in this book is his most popular list of "Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design," which read:

1. Strive for consistency. Consistent sequences of actions should be required in similar situations...
2. Enable frequent users to use shortcuts. As the frequency of use increases, so do the user's desires to reduce the number of interactions...
3. Offer informative feedback. For every operator action, there should be some system feedback...
4. Design dialog to yield closure. Sequences of actions should be organized into groups with a beginning, middle, and end...
5. Offer simple error handling. As much as possible, design the system so the user cannot make a serious error...
6. Permit easy reversal of actions. This feature relieves anxiety, since the user knows that errors can be undone...
7. Support internal locus of control. Experienced operators strongly desire the sense that they are in charge of the system and that the system responds to their actions. Design the system to make users the initiators of actions rather than the responders.
8. Reduce short-term memory load. The limitation of human information processing in short-term memory requires that displays be kept simple, multiple page displays be consolidated, window-motion frequency be reduced, and sufficient training time be allotted for codes, mnemonics, and sequences of actions.

These guidelines are frequently taught in courses on Human-Computer Interaction.

Information visualization

His major work in recent years has been on information visualization, originating the treemap concept for hierarchical data. Treemaps are implemented in most information visualization tools including Spotfire, Tableau Software, QlikView, SAS, JMP, and Microsoft Excel. Treemaps are included in hard drive exploration tools, stock market data analysis, census systems, election data, gene expression, and data journalism. The artistic side of treemaps are on view in the Treemap Art Project.

He also developed dynamic queries sliders with multiple coordinated displays that are a key component of Spotfire, which was acquired by TIBCO in 2007. His work continued on visual analysis tools for time series data, TimeSearcher, high dimensional data, Hierarchical Clustering Explorer, and social network data, SocialAction. Shneiderman contributed to the widely used social network analysis and visualization tool NodeXL.

Current work deals with visualization of temporal event sequences, such as found in Electronic Health Records, in systems such as LifeLines2 and EventFlow. These tools visualize the categorical data that make up a single patient history and they present an aggregated view that enables analysts to find patterns in large patient history databases.

Universal usability

He also defined the research area of universal usability to encourage greater attention to diverse users, languages, cultures, screen sizes, network speeds, and technology platforms.

Publications

Articles, a selection: