HUMAN COMPUTER

INTERACTION
BACHELOR OF SCIENCE IN INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY – SULU
COLLEGE OF TECHNOLOGY, INC.
 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.

Introduction to HCI
 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
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
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
Humans, Computer and Interaction

Humans good at: Sensing low level stimuli,

The H pattern 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.
The I Let humans do what humans do best and
computers do what computers do best.

Introduction to HCI
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.

Introduction to HCI
 Different Design Needs

Strive to understand the important factors, development

of tools and techniques, achieve effective and safe
system.

Introduction to HCI
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”.
Introduction to HCI
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.”

Introduction to HCI
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
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 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.
Introduction to HCI
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
Relationship of HCI to other disciplines

Introduction to HCI
 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
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.
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
 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 analysing routine human-computer
interaction.

Introduction to HCI
Introduction to HCI
 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
Topics in HCI

Introduction to HCI
 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 tailor ability, or other strategies (U3).

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Introduction to HCI
 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

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Introduction to HCI
 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).
Complex dialogues lead into considerations of the systems architecture
necessary to support such features as interconnect able application programs,
windowing, real-time response, network communications, multi-user and
cooperative interfaces, and multi-tasking of dialogue objects (C5).

Introduction to HCI
 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
 Earliest and Most influential 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/

Introduction to HCI
Earliest and Most influencial HCI research
Describe:
• The important research development in HCI technology
• The forces shaping future of HCI research

Introduction to HCI
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.
• 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
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
•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