Introduction to HCI

What is human-computer interaction (HCI)?

* HCI is the study and the practice of usability.

It is about understanding and creating software
and other technology that people will want to use,
will be able to use, and will find effective when
used.
* HCI is the study of how people use computer
systems to perform certain tasks.

Introduction to HCI AP Dr. Siti Salwah Salim

 Introduction to HCI
What is human-computer interaction (HCI)?
HCI tries to provide us with all understanding of
the computer and the person using it, so as to
make the interaction between them more effective
and more enjoyable.

Introduction to HCI AP Dr. Siti Salwah Salim

What is human-computer interaction (HCI)?

* HCI concerns:
process: design, evaluation and implementation
on: interactive computing systems for human use
plus: the study of major phenomena surrounding
them

Introduction to HCI AP Dr. Siti Salwah Salim

The goals of HCI
Ensuring usability.
“A usable software system is one that supports the
effective and efficient completion of tasks in a given
work context” (Karat and Dayton 1995).
The bottom-line benefits of more usable software
system to business users include:
• Increased productivity
• Decreased user training time and cost
• Decreased user errors
• Increased accuracy of data input and data interpretation
• Decreased need for ongoing technical support
Introduction to HCI AP Dr. Siti Salwah Salim
The goals of HCI
The bottom-line benefits of usability to development
organizations include:
• Greater profits due to more competitive products/services
• Decreased overall development and maintenance costs
• Decreased customer support costs
• More follow-on business due to satisfied customers
• Not to use the term ‘user-friendly’ which intended to mean a
system with high usability but always misinterpreted to mean
tidying up the screen displays to make it more pleasing

Introduction to HCI AP Dr. Siti Salwah Salim

The goals of HCI
To achieve usability, the design of the user interface to any
interactive product, needs to take into account and be tailored
around a number of factors, including:
• Cognitive, perceptual, and motor capabilities and constraints of
people in general
• Special and unique characteristics of the intended user population
in particular
• Unique characteristics of the users’ physical and social work
environment
• Unique characteristics and requirements of the users’ tasks, which
are being supported by the software
• Unique capabilities and constraints of the chosen software and/or
hardware and platform for the product

Introduction to HCI AP Dr. Siti Salwah Salim

Humans, Computer and Interaction

Humans good at: Sensing low level stimuli, pattern

The H recognition,inductive reasoning, multiple
strategies, adapting “Hard and fuzzy things”.

Computers good at: Counting and measuring,

The C accurate storage and recall, rapid and consistent
responses, data processing/calculation, repetitive
actions, performance over time, “Simple and
sharply defined things”.
The list of skills is somewhat complementary. Let
The I humans do what humans do best and computers do
what computers do best.

Introduction to HCI AP Dr. Siti Salwah Salim

Different design Needs

Three broad categories of computer user:

Expert users with detailed knowledge of that
particular system.
Occasional users who know well how to perform
the tasks they need to perform frequently.
Novices who have never used the system before.

Introduction to HCI AP Dr. Siti Salwah Salim

Different design Needs

Users may well be novices at one computer

application but experts at another one, so users will
belong to different categories for particular
computer systems.
Strive to understand the important factors,
development of tools and techniques, achieve
effective and safe system.

Introduction to HCI AP Dr. Siti Salwah Salim

Teaching User Interface Development to Software
Engineers , Gary Perlman, Ohio University.

“There are not many specialists in user interface

development, so most software user interfaces are
designed and built by software engineers. These
engineers need training about how to build usable
and useful user interfaces, but the scarcity of user
interface specialists is correlated with the lack of
educators ready to train user interface developers.

Introduction to HCI AP Dr. Siti Salwah Salim

Teaching User Interface Development to Software
Engineers , Gary Perlman, Ohio University.

A software engineer who has been trained in user

interface development should have gained
perspective, learned about methods and tools, and
gained an appreciation of their limits.
Their perspective should include: the importance of
the user interface, the impact of good and bad user
interfaces, and the diversity of users and
applications”.
Introduction to HCI AP Dr. Siti Salwah Salim
Teaching User Interface Development to Software
Engineers , Gary Perlman, Ohio University.

“About methods and tools they should know: the

tradeoffs of design decisions involving different
dialogue types and input/output devices, the
information resources available for design, the
benefits and costs of developing tools for user
interface implementation, the need to integrate
training materials with the user interface, the need
to evaluate system usability, and information about
some design and evaluation tools.

Introduction to HCI AP Dr. Siti Salwah Salim

Teaching User Interface Development to Software
Engineers , Gary Perlman, Ohio University.

Finally, software engineers building user interfaces

must know the limits of their knowledge: when
and how to work with human factors engineers as
consultants for design and evaluation, when and
how to work with technical writers for
implementation of a system of user guidance, when
and how to work with a statistical consultant, and
the difficulty of measurement and the complexity of
making decisions based on data.”

Introduction to HCI AP Dr. Siti Salwah Salim

Visibility and Affordance
Visibility – what is seen

Affordance – what operations and manipulation can

be done to a particular object

What is visible must have a good mapping to their

effect

Perceived affordance – what a person thinks can be

done to the object
Introduction to HCI AP Dr. Siti Salwah Salim
Visibility and Affordance

Introduction to HCI AP Dr. Siti Salwah Salim

Importance of HCI
Introduction
In the past, problems with poor interface design of computer
software have contributed to an enormous loss in productivity,
ranging from increases in time taken to input and process
information after computerisation, to deaths from airline crashes due
to pilots misreading the instrument readings on their aircraft.

A US study in the 1980s found that:

only 20% of new systems studied were considered to be successes
40 % produced only marginal gains
40 % resulted in rejection or failure of the system
this represents a huge loss of money, time and effort from all of the
people involved.

Introduction to HCI AP Dr. Siti Salwah Salim

Importance of HCI

HCI will be increasingly important in the following areas:

As part of software development process and system design methods

As part of future legal requirements for software

As the basis for a set of usability criteria to evaluate and choose from
amongst competing products

As the basis for successful marketing strategy to the increasingly

important home and small business user
Introduction to HCI AP Dr. Siti Salwah Salim
Relationship of HCI to other disciplines

Introduction to HCI AP Dr. Siti Salwah Salim

HCI is a multidisciplinary field – HCI draws
expertise from a number of different areas of study.
1. Prototyping and iterative development from
software engineering
Design is seen as opportunistic, concrete, and
necessarily iterative. By providing techniques to
quickly construct, evaluate, and change partial
solutions, prototyping has become a fulcrum for
system development.

Introduction to HCI AP Dr. Siti Salwah Salim

2. Software psychology and human factors of
computing systems
This work addressed a wide assortment of questions
about people experienced and how they perform
when they interact with computers. It studied how
system response time affects productivity, how
people specify and refine queries, etc.

Introduction to HCI AP Dr. Siti Salwah Salim

3. User interface software from computer
graphics
Before the 1960s, the focus of computing was
literally on computations, not on intelligibly
presenting the results.
4. Models, theories and frameworks from
cognitive science
These include the disciplined of linguistics,
anthropology, philosophy, psychology, and computer
science.

Introduction to HCI AP Dr. Siti Salwah Salim

This guidance would come from general principles
of perception and motor activity, problem-solving
and language, communication and group behavior
etc..
It would also include developing theories of HCI.
e.g. GOMS rules model for analyzing routine
human-computer interaction.

Introduction to HCI AP Dr. Siti Salwah Salim

A student of HCI will not need to know all these other subjects in
depth, of course. However, it is important to be aware that in HCI, we
may have to use the knowledge from some of these disciplines to
solve a problem in a certain situation.
•Linguistics
•Philosophy
•Sociology
•Anthropology
•Design
•Engineering
•Ergonomics and human factors
•Social and organizational psychology
•Cognitive psychology
•Artificial intelligence

Introduction to HCI AP Dr. Siti Salwah Salim

HCI in the 1990s: HCI research had become
relatively well integrated in computer science.

University HCI was included as one of ten major

curricula sections of the first handbook of Computer
Science and Engineering. (Tucker 1997).

Computing HCI practitioners have become well

Industry integrated in systems development.
HCI specialists have moved into a great
variety of roles beyond human factors
assurance.

Introduction to HCI AP Dr. Siti Salwah Salim

 Topics in HCI

Introduction to HCI AP Dr. Siti Salwah Salim

 Topics in HCI
Computer systems exist within a larger social, organizational and
work milieu (U1).

Within this context there are applications for which we wish to

employ computer systems (U2).

But the process of putting computers to work means that the

human, technical, and work aspects of the application situation
must be brought into fit with each other through human learning,
system tailorability, or other strategies (U3).

Introduction to HCI AP Dr. Siti Salwah Salim

 Topics in HCI

In addition to the use and social context of

computers, on the human side we must also take
into account:
•the human information processing (H1)
•communication (H2)
•and physical (H3) characteristics of users

Introduction to HCI AP Dr. Siti Salwah Salim

The following topics of HCI will be covered
through assignments and group
presentations/discussion:
Human Characteristics/The human aspects of
computing
It is important to understand something about human
information-processing characteristics, how human
action is structured, the nature of human
communication, and human physical and
physiological requirements.

Introduction to HCI AP Dr. Siti Salwah Salim

Human Information processing visual perception and
graphical representation at the interface attention and
memory constraints reading, hearing, and others(e.g.
movement, touch, problem solving-learning, errors,
skill acquisition, users’ conceptual models, mental
models, interface metaphors.
•Language, Communication and Interaction
•Ergonomics

Introduction to HCI AP Dr. Siti Salwah Salim

The Technology: Input and Output devices
After studying this topic you should be able to know about a
range of different devices and how they can be selected to
meet the needs of users, their work and work environments.
• Dialogue Inputs
Types of input purposes(e.g. selection, continuous control..)
•Input techniques
•The hand to input data
•Other means of input data (eye movement, the foot, the head,
facial
•expression, speech and sound
•Input for the disabled

Introduction to HCI AP Dr. Siti Salwah Salim

Dialogue Outputs
Types of output purposes (e.g. summary
information, illustrate processes, create
visualizations of information….)
Output techniques (e.g. scrolling display,
windows, animation, fish-eye displays,
sprites..)
Screen layout issues (e.g. focus, clutter, visual
logic)

Introduction to HCI AP Dr. Siti Salwah Salim

 Topics in HCI
On the computer side, a variety of technologies have been
developed for supporting interaction with humans:
Input and output devices connect the human and the
machine (C1).
These are used in a number of techniques for organizing a
dialogue (C2).
These techniques are used in turn to implement larger
design elements, such as the metaphor of the interface (C3).
Getting deeper into the machine substrata supporting the
dialogue, the dialogue may make extensive use of computer
graphics techniques (C4). AP Dr. Siti Salwah Salim
Introduction to HCI
 Topics in HCI
Complex dialogues lead into considerations of the systems
architecture necessary to support such features as
interconnectable application programs, windowing, real-
time response, network communications, multi-user and
cooperative interfaces, and multi-tasking of dialogue
objects (C5).

Introduction to HCI AP Dr. Siti Salwah Salim

 Topics in HCI
Finally, there is the process of development which
incorporates design (D1) for human-computer dialogues,
techniques and tools (D2) for implementing them (D2),
techniques for evaluating (D3) them, and a number of
classic designs for study (D4).

Introduction to HCI AP Dr. Siti Salwah Salim

Earliest and Most influencial HCI research
HCI evoked many difficult problems and elegant solutions in the
recent history of computing: direct manipulation, the mouse
pointing device, and windows; application areas, such as drawing,
text editing and spreadsheets, hypertext, user interface
management systems, toolkits, interface builders
“A Brief History of Human-Computer Interaction by Brad A. Myers”
“New Directions in HCI Education, Research and Practice”

http://www.victoriapoint.com/hci_history.html
http://www.sei.cmu.edu/community/hci/directions/
Forces shaping future of HCI

Introduction to HCI AP Dr. Siti Salwah Salim

Earliest and Most influencial HCI research

Describe:
• the important research development in HCI
technology
• the forces shaping future of HCI research

Introduction to HCI AP Dr. Siti Salwah Salim

Give examples/illustrate through pictures, where necessary , when
describing the issues/concepts.
References: Jenny Preece, Alan Dix, and HCI web resources.

Introduction to HCI AP Dr. Siti Salwah Salim