PERI INSTITUTE OF

TECHNOLOGY
DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER
SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING
VII - SEMESTER
CS8079 HUMAN COMPUTER
INTERACTION

STAFF : K.ARUN
OBJECTIVES:

• To learn the foundations of Human

Computer
Interaction.

• To become familiar with the design

technologies
for individuals and persons with
disabilities.

• To be aware of mobile HCI.

• To learn the guidelines for user interface.

TEXT BOOKS:

1. Alan Dix, Janet Finlay, Gregory Abowd, Russell

Beale, ―Human Computer Interaction‖, 3rd
Edition, Pearson Education, 2004 (UNIT I, II & III)

2. Brian Fling, ―Mobile Design and Development‖,

First Edition, O‘Reilly Media Inc., 2009 (UNIT – IV)

3. Bill Scott and Theresa Neil, ―Designing Web

Interfaces‖, First Edition, O‘Reilly, 2009. (UNIT-V)
OUTCOMES:
Upon completion of the course, the student should be able
to:

 Design effective dialog for HCI.

 Design effective HCI for individuals and persons with

disabilities.

 Assess the importance of user feedback.

 Explain the HCI implications for designing multimedia/

ecommerce/ e-learning Web sites.

 Develop meaningful user interface.

UNIT I - FOUNDATIONS OF HCI

The Human: I/O channels – Memory – Reasoning and

problem solving; The Computer: Devices – Memory –
processing and networks; Interaction: Models –
frameworks – Ergonomics – styles – elements –
interactivity- Paradigms. - Case Studies
Introduction

•Human-computer interaction (commonly referred to as HCI)

• Researches the design and use of computer technology.

•The interfaces between people (users) and computers.

•Observe the ways in which humans interact with computers

and design technologies

•Humans interact with computers in novel ways.

Computer

Referring to any technology ranging from desktop computers,

to large scale computer systems.

design of a Website, then the Website itself would be referred

to as "the computer".

Devices such as mobile phones or VCRs can also be considered

to be ―computers‖.
Interaction

There are obvious differences between humans and

machines.

HCI - attempts to ensure that they both get on with each

other and interact successfully.

To achieve a usable system, you need to apply what you

know about humans and computers.

consult with likely users throughout the design process.

To find a balance between what would be ideal for the users

and what is feasible in reality.
User

• "user", an individual user, a group of users working together.

• People's sensory systems (sight, hearing, touch) relay

information is vital.

•Different users form different conceptions or models about

their interactions and

•Have different ways of learning and keeping knowledge.

The Goals of HCI

•To produce usable and safe systems, as well as functional systems.

•Understand the factors that determine how people use technology

• Develop tools and techniques to enable building suitable systems,

achieve efficient, effective, and safe interaction

• Their needs, capabilities and preferences for conducting various tasks

•The way that they use a system in order to fit in with it. Instead, the
system should be designed to match their requirements.
Usability
Usability is one of the key concepts in HCI.
It is concerned with making systems easy to learn and use.

A usable system is:

 easy to learn
 easy to remember how to use
 effective to use
 efficient to use
 safe to use
 enjoyable to use
Factors in HCI
There are a large number of factors which should be
considered in the analysis and design of a system using HCI
principles.

Organization Factors

 Training, job design, politics, roles, work organization

 Environmental Factors
 Noise, heating, lighting, ventilation
 Health and Safety Factors
The User

 Cognitive processes and capabilities

 Motivation, enjoyment, satisfaction, personality, experience
 Comfort Factors
 Seating, equipment, layout.
User Interface

Input devices, output devices, dialogue structures, use of colour,

icons, commands, navigation, graphics, natural language, user
support, multimedia.

Task Factors: Easy, complex, novel, task allocation, monitoring,

skills
Constraints : Cost, timescales, budgets, staff, equipment,
buildings
System Functionality: Hardware, software, application
Productivity Factors : Increase output, increase quality,
decrease costs, decrease errors, increase innovation
Disciplines contributing to HCI

Some of the main disciplines which have contributed to HCI are:

Computer Science
Cognitive Psychology

Social Psychology
Ergonomics/Human Factors
Linguistics

Artificial Intelligence

Engineering & Design

Computer Science
 technology
 software design, development & maintenance
 User Interface Management Systems (UIMS) & User Interface
Development
Environments (UIDE)
 prototyping tools
 graphics

Cognitive Psychology
 information processing
 capabilities
 limitations
 cooperative working
 performance prediction
Social Psychology
 social & organizational structures

Ergonomics/Human Factors
 hardware design
 display readability

Linguistics
 natural language interfaces

Artificial Intelligence
 intelligent software

Engineering & Design

 graphic design
 engineering principles
INPUT–OUTPUT CHANNELS
A person‘s interaction with the outside world occurs through
information being received and sent: input and output.

Input in the human occurs mainly through the senses and

output through the motor control of the effectors.

There are five major senses: sight, hearing, touch, taste and
smell. Of these, the first three are the most important to HCI.

Taste and smell do not currently play a significant role in HCI

vision, hearing and touch are central.

Vision

Human vision is a highly complex activity with a range of

physical and perceptual limitations.

Divide visual perception into two stages:

The physical reception of the stimulus from the outside world,

The processing and interpretation of that stimulus.

The physical properties of the eye and the visual system mean
that there are certain things that cannot be seen by the human.
The interpretative capabilities of visual processing allow
images to be constructed from incomplete information.

We need to understand , what can and cannot be perceived

visually by a human being, which in turn directly affects the
way that we design computer systems.
The human eye

Vision begins with light. The eye is a mechanism for receiving

light and transforming it into electrical energy. Light is reflected
from objects in the world and their image is focused upside
down on the back of the eye. The receptors in the eye transform
it into electrical signals which are passed to the brain.

The eye has a number of important components. The cornea and

lens at the front of the eye focus the light into a sharp image on
the back of the eye, the retina.

The retina is light sensitive and contains two types of

photoreceptor: rods and cones.
Rods :

Highly sensitive to light and therefore allow us to see under

a low level of illumination.

They are unable to resolve fine detail and are subject to light
saturation.

This is the reason for the temporary blindness we get when

moving from a darkened room into sunlight: the rods have
been active and are saturated by the sudden light.
Cones : are the second type of receptor in the eye.

They are less sensitive to light than the rods and can therefore
tolerate more light.

There are three types of cone, each sensitive to a different

wavelength of light.

This allows color vision. The eye has approximately 6 million

cones, mainly concentrated on the fovea, a small area of the
retina on which images are fixated.
The retina is mainly covered with photoreceptors there is one
blind spot where the optic nerve enters the eye. The blind spot
has no rods or cones.

The retina also has specialized nerve cells called ganglion cells.
There are two types:

X-cells, which are concentrated in the fovea and are

responsible for the early detection of pattern;

Y-cells which are more widely distributed in the retina and are
responsible for the early detection of movement
Visual perception
The information received by the visual apparatus must be
filtered and passed to processing elements which allow us to
recognize coherent scenes, disambiguate relative distances
and differentiate colour.

How does the eye perceive size, depth and relative distances?

To understand this we must consider how the image appears

on the retina.

Reflected light from the object forms an upside-down image

on the retina. The size of that image is specified as a visual
angle.
The visual angle measurement is given in either degrees or
minutes of arc, where 1 degree is equivalent to 60 minutes
of arc, and 1 minute of arc to 60 seconds of arc.
Perceiving brightness
Brightness is in fact a subjective reaction to levels of light. It
is affected by luminance which is the amount of light
emitted by an object. The luminance of an object is
dependent on the amount of light falling on the object‘s
surface and its reflective properties.

Luminance is a physical characteristic and can be measured

using a photometer. Contrast is related to luminance: it is a
function of the luminance of an object and the luminance of
its background.
Perceiving colour: A third factor that we need to consider is
perception of colour. Colour is usually regarded as being
made up of three components: hue, intensity and saturation.

Hue is determined by the spectral wavelength of the light.

Blues have short wavelengths, greens medium and reds long.
Approximately 150 different hues can be discriminated by the
average person.

Intensity is the brightness of the color, and

saturation is the amount of whiteness in the color.

By varying these two, we can perceive in the region of 7

million different colors.
The capabilities and limitations of visual processing

Visual processing involves the transformation and

interpretation of a complete image, from the light that is
thrown onto the retina.

Visual processing compensates - movement of the image on

the retina which occurs as we move around.

colour and brightness of objects are perceived as constant, in

spite of changes in luminance.
This ability to interpret and exploit our expectations can be
used to resolve ambiguity.
Reading: There are several stages in the reading process.
First, the visual pattern of the word on the page is perceived.
Then decoded with reference to an internal representation of
language.
The final stages - syntactic and semantic analysis

During reading, the eye makes jerky movements called

saccades followed by fixations.
Perception occurs during the fixation periods, which account for
approximately 94% of the time elapsed.

The eye moves backwards over the text as well as forwards, in

what
are known as regressions. If the text is complex there will be
more regressions.
Hearing

The sense of hearing - considered secondary to sight,

hearing begins with vibrations in the air or sound waves.

The ear receives these vibrations and transmits them, through

various stages, to the auditory nerves.

The ear comprises three sections, commonly known as the

Outer ear, middle ear and inner ear.
The outer ear is the visible part of the ear. It has two parts:
the pinna, which is the structure that is attached to the sides of
the head.
the auditory canal, along which sound waves are passed to the
middle ear.

The outer ear serves two purposes.

It protects the sensitive middle ear from damage.

The auditory canal contains wax which prevents dust, dirt and
over-inquisitive insects reaching the middle ear.

Secondly, the pinna and auditory canal serve to amplify some

sounds.
Processing sound

Processing sound has a number of characteristics.

Pitch is the frequency of the sound.

A low frequency produces a low pitch, a high frequency, a high

pitch.

Loudness is proportional to the amplitude of the sound.

Timbre relates to the type of the sound.

The human ear can hear frequencies from about 20 Hz to 15 kHz.

It can distinguish frequency changes of less than 1.5 Hz at low

frequencies but is less accurate at high frequencies.

Different frequencies trigger activity in neurons in different parts

of the auditory System.

The auditory system performs some filtering of the sounds

received, allowing us to ignore background noise and concentrate
on important information.

The exception is multimedia, which may include music, voice

commentary and sound effects.
Touch

Touch provides us with vital information about our environment.

It tells us when we touch something hot or cold.

It also provides us with feedback when we attempt to lift an

object.

This is the experience of users of certain virtual reality games.

Haptic perception is a secondary source of information, for those

whose other senses are impaired, it may be vitally important.
The skin contains three types of sensory receptor:

Thermo receptors respond to heat and cold,

Nociceptors respond to intense pressure, heat and pain, and

Mechanoreceptors respond to pressure.

 Movement

A simple action such as hitting a button in response to a

question involves a number of processing stages.

Movement time is dependent largely on the physical

characteristics of the subjects: their age and fitness.

A person can react to an auditory signal in approximately 150

ms, to a visual signal in 200 ms and to pain in 700 ms.
A second measure of motor skill is accuracy. One question that
we should ask is whether speed of reaction results in reduced
accuracy.
Increased reaction time reduces accuracy.

Speed and accuracy of movement are important considerations

in the design of interactive systems

The time taken to hit a target is a function of the size of the

target and the distance that has to be moved.

This is formalized in Fitts‘ law .

Movement time = a + b log2(distance/size + 1)

HUMAN MEMORY
Our memory contains our knowledge of actions or
procedures. It allows us to repeat actions, to use language,
and to use new information received via our senses.
Memory is the second part of our model of the human as an
information-processing system.

There are three types of memory or memory function:

sensory buffers,
short-term memory or working memory, and
long-term memory.
These memories interact, with information being processed and
passed between memory stores.
Sensory memory
The sensory memories act as buffers for stimuli received through
the senses.
sensory channel:
iconic memory for visual stimuli,
echoic memory for aural stimuli and
haptic memory for touch.

Echoic memory is evidenced by our ability to ascertain the

direction from which a sound originates.

Information is passed from sensory memory into short-term

memory by attention.
Attention is the concentration of the mind on one out of a
number of competing stimuli or thoughts.

It is clear that we are able to focus our attention selectively,

choosing to attend to one thing rather than another.

This is due to the limited capacity of our sensory and mental

processes.
Short-term memory

Short-term memory or working memory acts as a ‗scratch-

pad‘ for temporary recall of information.

Short-term memory can be accessed rapidly, in the order of

70 ms.

There are two basic methods for measuring memory

capacity.

The first involves determining the length of a sequence which

can be remembered in order.

The second allows items to be freely recalled in any order.