View article

At the first meeting of the Interest Group on Individual Differences, held at CHI'85 (and reported in the July 1985 issue of the Bulletin), many attendees stated that they came to find out what was meant by "individual differences." Others had noticed differences among their users and were looking for guidelines to assist them in designing user-system interfaces to accommodate this variation. Still others, myself included, were familiar with one or two specific kinds of individual differences and had some ideas about their possible implications for USI design. Some of us had begun to investigate some of the differences, but no one seemed to have comprehensive information on the current state of knowledge about individual differences.