DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER ENGINEERING

HUMAN COMPUTER INTERACTION

BCT III

By

Lusiba Badru
The world is full of badly designed things
And well designed thing
Does it matter?
If things are badly designed,
You may camp in the wrong place
You may crash your car and get
injured.. Or worse!

… in the best case – you might go

angry, make mistakes and things
will take longer than they should.
What is HCI?
• HCI (human-computer
interaction) is the study of how
people interact with computers
and to what extent computers are
or are not developed for
successful interaction with
human beings.
HCI != Usability
• In addition, HCI uses mathematical
• A usable system is easy to learn, easy models to predict users’ performance
to remember how to use, effective, with a system (e.g., Fitt’s law to predict
efficient, safe, and enjoyable to use. mouse movement time, or models that
predict search time or mental effort)
• Usability is only one part of HCI, but
has been one of the main goals For • HCI also investigates new interaction
paradigms or new ways of integrating
example, HCI has contributed to the technology in our daily lives (think
development of guidelines and smart clothes, touch displays, VR/AR,
standards that support designers Voice-based interfaces … )

• HCI has also developed methods of • HCI is concerned with understanding

the influence technology has on how
evaluation that help us to evaluate the people think, value, feel, and relate and
usability of a given product/system using this understanding to inform
(and other aspects of the user technology design.
experience)
To make better interactive technology
• We need to
• Know about how people interact with things
• Know about what people can and can’t do
• Know about the situations in which people do things
• Know about the basics of good design
• Understand people’s goals
 HCI is made up of
• Theories – learn and apply
• Models – create and use
• Methods – master and apply
• Guidelines – learn and use
• Principles – understand and apply
• Techniques – master and use
How we make ‘sense’ of the world around us
• inputs and understanding
• Each Sense has
• A tool – e.g.. Eye, skin, ear etc
• A process – nerves, electricity
etc
• Limitations – pitch, brightness
etc
• And there is the added
complexity of individual
differences in sensory
perception
Sight - Interpreting Images
• Interpreting images
• Size and depth • The visual system compensates
• visual angle indicates how much of for:
view object occupies cues like
overlapping help perception of size
• movement
and depth • changes in luminance.
• Brightness • Context is used to resolve
ambiguity
• affected by luminance of object
measured by just noticeable
difference visual acuity increases with
luminance as does flicker
• Colour
• blue acuity (ability to understand and
reason) is lowest 8% males and 1% • Optical illusions sometimes occur
females colour blind. due to over compensation
Hearing
• Provides information about environment: distances, directions, objects etc.
• Physical apparatus: " outer ear, middle ear, inner ear –
• Key Sound Variations
✓ pitch – sound frequency
✓ loudness – amplitude
✓ timbre – type or quality
• Humans can hear frequencies from 20Hz to 15kHz
✓ less accurate distinguishing high frequencies than low.
• Auditory system filters sounds
✓ can attend to sounds over background noise.
• for example, the cocktail party phenomenon.
Touch
• Provides important feedback about environment.
• May be a key sense for someone who is visually impaired.
• Stimulus received via receptors in the skin:
✓ thermoreceptors – heat and cold
✓ nociceptors – pain
✓ mechanoreceptors – pressure
• Some areas more sensitive than others e.g. fingers.
• Kinethesis - awareness of body position
✓ affects comfort and performance.
Smell and Taste

• Not much used in computer interfaces but IoT based

factory interfaces using smell are currently being
developed
The Human as a Store
• Humans have the
capacity to remember and
retrieve information…
• this affects the way they
use technology
Three Different ‘Stores’

1.Sensory buffers: momentary stores for stimuli received by

the senses. This information, unless encoded in the short-
term memory, is quickly lost.
2.Short-term memory (or working memory): short-term
memory acts as a store for information required fleetingly.
3.Long-term memory: this forms the main resource for
memory.
Short Term Memory

• An example of this would be recalling a telephone number long

enough to write it down. Short-term memory degrades quickly, and
has a limited capacity.
• Quick access time – 70ms
• Short term storage – 200ms (10 – 20 second decay time)
• Limited capacity
✓ Length of sequence remembered in order = 7 ± 2 (Miller, 1956) chunks of
data are similar recency effect
• Maintained and increased with rehearsal
• Nowadays referred to as ‘Working memory’
Chunking and STM

• Short-term memory holds information that is actively being used

(thought about, reasoned with).
• A chunk can be thought of as a single object that conveys a larger
amount of information.
• Examples of these include words, shapes and colours. However, the
information decays in seconds as items are displaced by new items
coming in.
• Icons are an example of chunked information on a desktop which
allows users to distinguish between the various programs available to
them.
LTM – Networked chunks
• Here we store everything we ‘know’. Long-term memory is characterised by
huge capacity, slow access time and relative accuracy over time.
• It is organised in an Episodic way events and experiences in sequential order
……..and a Semantic way of facts, concepts and skills that we have acquired
• Storage
✓ Structure, familiarity and concreteness
✓ Forgetting is chunking
✓ Decay, interference
• Retrieval
✓ Recall – reproduced
✓ Recognition – clue given
How humans solve problems
• Deductive
• Inductive
• Abductive
✓ reasoning
Deductive Reasoning
• derive logically necessary conclusion from given premises.
e.g. If it is Monday then she will go to work
• It is Monday
Therefore she will go to work.

• Logical conclusion not necessarily true:

• e.g. If it is raining then the ground is dry
• It is raining
Therefore the ground is dry
Inductive Reasoning
• generalize from cases seen to cases unseen
• e.g. all elephants we have seen have trunks
• therefore, all elephants have trunks.
• Unreliable:
• can only prove false not true
… but useful
Abductive reasoning
• reasoning from event to cause
• e.g. Sam drives fast when drunk.
• If I see Sam driving fast, assume drunk.
• Unreliable:
• can lead to false explanations
END OF LECTERE 1

Thanks a lot