Interview with Dianne Murray

Dianne Murray was born in 1955 in Paisley in the west of Scotland. She is the oldest sister to two brothers. Her father was an engineer who became a company director later in his career. Her mother held a numbers of jobs before she married and then became a housewife. Once the three children had grown up, her mother became a shop owner.

Dianne cites her father as one of her main influences, saying: “He was a very bright man.  He didn’t have a great upbringing, they were a single-parent family and quite poor, but he took himself through night-school and became a director of an engineering company.  So, following his example was a very good idea.”

Dianne attended St Catherine’s, a mixed primary school primary school which was run by nuns, and St Margaret’s Senior High in Scotland, in Paisley.  She adds: “I sat the Eleven Plus exam, I think we were possibly the last year of that. I passed it and went on to a Catholic senior high school, also run by nuns, and stayed there for six years. I studied a lot of languages.  I didn’t study science, and I only studied mathematics to O Levels. I went on to study Highers, and then, special Scottish sixth-year studies.  My favourite subject was definitely English.”

At the age of seventeen Dianne went to Edinburgh University to study Psychology and linguistics.  She says of the experience: “I moved away from home, and, I think I was much too young at the time; I didn’t get on particularly well.  I was very lonely. I moved in a nice circle, but then that broke up after the first couple of terms and although I passed my course, I decided not to continue with it.”

Between the ages of nineteen and twenty-two, Dianne took a variety of jobs before deciding she wanted to return to university to study psychology again.  In the interim, she did a computing course at Napier College.

She says: “It was a very early computing.  We learnt about old-fashioned computers with punch cards and paper tape, and learnt all of the codes for those, and the computer languages BASIC and COBOL.”

Having enjoyed the course, Dianne decided she wanted to study a combination of psychology and computer science at university. She continues: “I searched around for a course.  Unfortunately there were only two courses in the country at that time that did that combination that was later on to become an HCI degree.  I found one at Brunel University in London, and decided to move to London to take up that course. When I got there, I discovered that I was the only person in my year taking that particular degree course and that was rather difficult. There were two people in the year above, and one person in the year above that, but we were a very, very small group of people.  We knew each other but we didn’t really cohere that much.  It was difficult doing the course, because I essentially did half of the psychology degree and half of the computer science degree at the same time, and I had to do a lot of the physical arrangements of courses and classes and where I was going to be by myself.”

The degree was a sandwich course and Dianne spent six months studying and six months on placements. Two of her placements involved working as an intern at the National Physical Laboratory. She says: “For one of my placements, I worked in a doctor’s surgery, which had a medical interviewing computer called MICKIE, which I worked on and which had been provided by the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in Teddington, Middlesex. In subsequent placements over the next two years I went to NPL itself, basically as an intern, and I worked, not on MICKIE but on a follow-up to that, which was called Microtext.  At the end of my second placement, they suggested that I join NPL as a scientific civil servant.  I sat all of the exams, took the interviews, and got a place.  By the time I graduated I had a job to go to the very next week at NPL as a government scientific officer, a Junior researcher in a Government research laboratory.”

MICKIE was used to interview patients in a medical situation. It was designed by Dr Chris Evans at the National Physical Laboratory, who had been asked to set up an informatics group called Man-Machine Integration which would later become Human Computer Interaction (HCI). Nigel Bevan, Dianne’s boss, also worked on it.

She says of the machine: “The answers to a set of questions posed were ‘yes’, ‘no’, or ‘don’t know’, and the ‘don’t know’ answers were the ones the doctor, Dr Geoffrey Dove, used to explore further to find out what might be the issue and if it might be a psychological problem rather than a physical problem. There was a variant of MICKIE at Glasgow University Hospital. MICKIE was not terribly robust at times.  It was on a Commodore PET, and then on the RAIR Black Box, which is a very esoteric type of old computer, not many people had them.”

Dianne explains how she first experienced it in her placement at a doctor’s surgery: “I sat in the doctor’s waiting room, and talked to patients, interviewing patients beforehand, then sometimes went in to sit with the interview with the doctor.  I analysed the printout from MICKIE afterwards, and talked to the doctor about what had been an important part of the interview, and if MICKIE had actually helped in any way. It was quite detailed.”

Having accepted the role as a government scientific officer at NPL Dianne says the environment was “very much a research laboratory, and much more like a university campus than any organisation”.  She continues: “It was, and still is, the National Standards laboratory for the UK. I was in the Numerical Analysis and Computer Science department.  The atmosphere was very serious, but very innovative as well. We were allowed to do essentially blue sky research without necessarily having a particular goal or a particular product which we had to develop at the end of it. It was rather different from the research situation nowadays; there’s very few places that do pure blue sky research. Alan Turing was also at NPL at one stage for a couple of years, and it was interesting to read about the history of that.  They also had one of the very first computers in the 1950s and ’60s. It’s now no longer a fully research-based laboratory; it’s been privatised, and is now run by SERCO.  The HCI Group that was there has been moved to an individual consultancy looking at contracts in usability and evaluation and interface assessment.”

While at NPL, Dianne worked on the Microtext system which she describes as an authoring system.  She adds: “By itself wasn’t a computer-based training, or CBT, system.  It was used to write applications which were mainly for primary schools. It was distributed to a number of schools all over the country.

“It was essentially specified by the HCI Group at the National Physical Laboratory, which was a very small group comprising Nigel, myself, another student, a computer technician and Bob Watson who was a general administrator. We sent out the actual coding of Microtext to a small software company called Ariadne and then did a lot of internal testing with it. I did some of the testing by going to different schools that had a copy running on the BBC Micro with cassette tapes.  Then, we got into developing what were called videodiscs at the time, and, there was a written engineering interface which allowed Microtext to control the videodisc player; that was yet another level of interactivity with the system itself.  My role was essentially doing some of the evaluation and assessment, and in contributing to the writing of the two manuals for the system, and contributing towards its eventual commercial development with Acornsoft.  We did also work with the Open University, with a branch of the BBC that had developed the interactive videodisc and with British Telecom Research Laboratories at Martlesham Heath.”

After a promotion, Dianne worked on some research into intelligent systems and adaptive interfaces. She explains: “I had learnt about this from work that took place at Leicester Polytechnic with Peter Innocent and Ernest Edmonds, and I got very, very interested in this area, and started doing research and publications in it. Adaptive interfaces are those which went on to become recommender systems, and which aim to find out information about the user using the interface so that it could be amended and adapted and fit the user’s needs and expectations better. For that you had to have some information about the user, and then to have a representation of that called a user model within the system. I worked on user modelling.”

In 1983 the BCS HCI group was formed by Nigel Bevan and Peter Johnson at UCL Ergonomics Unit based on the SIGCHI model in America which had started two years previously. Dianne explains: “Nigel persuaded a number of like-minded people in places like Martlesham Heath with British Telecoms Research Laboratory, the Ergonomics Unit at the University of London, and various people who were consultants who were interested, to set up this group.

Dianne highlights some of those involved in the early stages, adding: “Peter Johnson at the Ergonomics Unit was one of the co-founders of the group.  Russell Winder was very much involved in the early BCS HCI Group, and was leader of the group for a number of years.  He was very important in merging the two areas of software engineering, and software programming, and HCI and psychology.  Tony Ruben from BT Research Labs was involved.  Karmen Guevara was a consultant for a number of prestigious American organisations.  Other members included Dan Diaper, who was Peter Johnson’s PhD student and Gilbert Cockton.”

The group met monthly, had a newsletter which Dianne wrote, and used early email via email addresses supplied the computer science department of University College London. The group at NPL also had its own internal mail system and had an interactive online journal called the BLEND system, run by Professor Brian Shackel.

In 1985 Dianne and Dan Diaper created a journal entitled ‘Interacting with Computers, The Interdisciplinary Journal of Human-Computer Interaction’, referred to as IwC. Dan was the Editor, and Dianne was the Deputy Editor.  It was originally published by Butterworths, and then Elsevier and nowadays by Oxford University Press (OUP).

Dianne says: “We felt as though we needed the tagline to ensure that people knew what sort of journal it was, and although it was the journal of the BCS HCI Group, we also intended it to be international, and to cover many areas of human-computer interaction.  We had one editorial board that was divided into three areas; computer science, psychology, and applications.”  It is still going strong today with a good international readership, citation factor and is well-respected over a number of disciplines, as we intended.  So it has been a success.

In the 1980s, after the National Physical Laboratory was under the remit of the Department of Trade and Industry, Dianne left and moved to City University to post as a Lecturer in HCI where she could continue her research. She would go on to move to work in a number of universities, including Kings College London, University  of Sussex and UCL’s Goldsmiths College, University of Surrey before deciding to become a consultant.

During her time doing research, Dianne made contacts with numbers of organisations and went on to do consultancy work with them after being made redundant from a Research Fellow post at the University of Surrey.

She also did some work for her husband’s company.  She says: “I did consultancy on projects for his company over ten years. He had also been at NPL, working on microtext and the interactive video side of things, and he started a software company called the Soft Option Limited. They looked at user needs and requirements and built video systems for computer-based training, and applications for stands at exhibitions.”

After having twins, Dianne says life became a little more complicated but adds: “I managed to continue teaching part of the International Degree at the University of London. I ran the HCI course, and later Software Engineering Project Management course for students who were abroad but who wanted to study computer science and systems analysis at UCL. I managed to continue working at home for the next very many years, until I finally retired when I was 60.”

Asked what women’s role was in the development of British HCI, Dianne says: “There were very few women in the HCI field at that time, although strangely enough, there were more women in computer science degrees than there have been in more recent years, but not many went into research. … The role of women was not exactly overlooked, but wasn’t at the forefront as it has become now. There were some very strong women in the start of the HCI Group, and women who were researchers across the UK, America and Europe, were chosen as members of IwC’s editorial board.  We had a lot more women members on our editorial board than did other similar journals, so I feel very good about promoting women in that particular area.”

Some of the women on the board over time included Jenny Preece, Karmen Guevara, Angela Sasse, Mary Beth Rosson, Marilyn Mantei, Gitte Lindgaard, Hilary Johnson, Claire O’Malley, Phyllis Reisner, Lucy Suchman , Francoise Detienne, and Claire-Marie Karat.

Looking at the industry today, Dianne adds: “Luckily, there are more and more women becoming involved in human-computer interaction, what the Americans call CHI, and this is all to the good. However, we still have issues with recognition and with life-work balance.  It’s still very, very difficult for women, especially, to manage the two of them. As somebody who has done both, I can see what the problems were, and that they still exist.  The other area in which the discipline is falling behind is in diversity, and in attracting those with special needs, and with particular requirements that they need for access to computers et cetera et cetera. There has been a very strong feminist move over the past five years or so towards gaining accessibility and gender-free type of work.”

Speaking about the relationship between the British and American HCI groups, Dianne says: “There was a very close and friendly relationship between the two societies to begin with. They were seen as equivalent in some way, because the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI) and the BCS HCI Group, pursued the same goals basically, but were run by different overriding organisations, the Association for Computing Machinery, ACM, in the States, and the BCS in Britain.  I was the liaison point for the two groups, being the envoy if you like to SIGCHI’s committee, and then becoming International Chair.  I was on the committee for SIGCHI for four or five years perhaps. There was a lot of interaction between the two groups.

“I think it was generally felt that the US, or the northern American group, was more interested in practical applications, and more interested in the mechanics of interaction and interface design. … In terms of the UK, we were more psychologically and sometimes ergonomically focused, and we looked also at things like programming languages, or the software ergonomics part of interface and ergonomic design.  We looked a lot more at experimental psychology, and had input to it from that.  A lot of the work that came was from psychology-based researchers who may have moved into computer science departments like Harold Thimbleby, John Long, Richard Young, Thomas Green, Andrew Monk, Steve Payne, Peter Johnson did for example.  There was a dichotomy, the UK was very much closer to what was happening in Europe and to European researchers and cognitive ergonomics at that time. There was a bit of a bias in the US and Canada to North American work, and it took quite a long time before British work began to be recognised totally.”

Looking at the impact of British research in the field of HCI, Dianne says: “Today there are various specialities that HCI has managed to help foster, for example, all the work on virtual reality that took place at Nottingham. In Dundee there is a games industry which I think has been impacted a lot.  The other aspect is, to some extent from computer-based training, computer-aided instruction, that has veered off into an area of its own and become very commercialised.

“Another particular area is in medical interaction.  We have a lot of machines and computers in medical situations now. This was something that was found interesting and innovative at the time, both by the BCS HCI Group and a group called the Medical Computing Group. The person that I worked for on MICKIE set up that group.

“The whole usability industry didn’t exist before HCI. The concept of evaluating interfaces was somewhat strange at the time. The software engineers did testing but didn’t do anything like usability testing, didn’t have concepts of what the user actually did, or required.

Looking at the challenges for HCI in the next ten years, Dianne points to robotic interaction, the expansion of virtual reality, and medical informatics  Adding: “Those are the areas I see as being prime and being very much open to development and exploitation.”

Looking at her career, Dianne says: “One of her first key decisions was choosing HCI as a research medium. At university I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do.  I liked both subjects, but HCI as a separate discipline and it hadn’t really been developed yet.  When as a student to NPL, I found that I really enjoyed that aspect and that I could maybe make a difference. The mistake I made, in retrospect, was leaving National Physical Laboratory, because I would have moved much more quickly into evaluation and assessment and user requirements.

“I did a lot of teaching in HCI over various universities, but I don’t think I was a very good teacher. I didn’t really enjoy it very much.  I lost my research focus in all of the teaching. I don’t regret going back to work after my children were born.  I don’t think I could have coped just with being at home and not being involved in something that was new and exciting.”

Reflecting on her proudest achievements, Dianne points to being the editor of the journal. She adds: “In the 2000s it had a very good Impact Factor for the number of articles which were read and referenced, and we produced some extremely good papers at that time. We started off a series of special interest editions, which I think really did help the field.  It was looking at what was new in the field, and what was to come, the up-to-the-minute research that people were acting on and developing further.”

Offering advice to those who might be considering a career in HCI, Dianne says: “It’s a very exciting place to be, because there is so much happening in the future.  It has quite a wide history as well in terms of things that were carried out, and have carried forward into the computer systems that we use today. HCI has helped in the development of mobile phones, not so much the technology, but the way in which we interact with mobile phones nowadays.  So there are exciting areas to be involved in.  It’s actually a very friendly research and applications discipline.  We have very good conferences, people remain in contact with each other.  We have now very many international associations with different countries, from Australia through to India, and there’s a lot of potential travel involved.”

Interviewed by Elisabetta Mori

Transcribed by Susan Hutton

Abstracted by Lynda Feeley