Chapter 1 Introduction To HCI

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.
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.
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
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
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
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
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, accurate

The C 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.
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.
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.
Different design Needs
Strive to understand the important factors,

development of tools and techniques, achieve
effective and safe system.
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.
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”.
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.
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.”
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
Importance of HCI
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 computerization, 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.
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
Relationship of HCI to other disciplines
Relationship of HCI to other
disciplines
HCI is a multidisciplinary field – HCI draws expertise

from a number of different areas of study.
1. Prototyping and 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.
disciplines
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.
disciplines
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.
disciplines
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.
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
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.
Topics in HCI
Give examples/illustrate through pictures, where necessary , when
describing the issues/concepts.
References: Jenny Preece, Alan Dix, and HCI web resources.
THANK YOU

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Introduction to HCI

What is human-computer interaction (HCI)?

* HCI is the study and the practice of usability.

* HCI is the study of how people use computer systems to perform

The bottom-line benefits of more usable software system to business users

The bottom-line benefits of usability to development organizations

Humans good at: Sensing low level stimuli, pattern

Computers good at: Counting and measuring, accurate

The list of skills is somewhat complementary. Let

Three broad categories of computer user:

Strive to understand the important factors,

“There are not many specialists in user interface development, so most

Visibility – what is seen

Affordance – what operations and manipulation can be done to a

What is visible must have a good mapping to their effect

Perceived affordance – what a person thinks can be done to the

A US study in the 1980s found that:

HCI will be increasingly important in the following areas:

HCI is a multidisciplinary field – HCI draws expertise

2. Software psychology and human factors of computing systems

3. User interface software from computer graphics

This guidance would come from general principles of perception and

University HCI was included as one of ten major

Computing HCI practitioners have become well

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