Introduction to Human
Computer Interaction
(HCI)
April 8, 2025
Human Computer Interaction
• A very new, eclectic discipline – around 40 years old – a millennial field, almost
We are all users, therefore…
We know some things
We are still to know many things
How did it all begin?
Initial perspective of HCI as a discipline was of an applied science that
could use cognitive science theories and methods to inform the
development of software
• Goals
• understand how people make use of computational systems and devices
• how they could be designed to be usable and useful?
• why do some kinds of interactive systems generate more enthusiasm others?
Shneiderman, "Direct Manipulation: A Step Beyond Programming
Languages," in Computer, vol. 16, no. 8, pp. 57-69, Aug. 1983, doi:
10.1109/MC.1983.1654471.
Direct manipulation of objects
• visibility of objects,
• incremental action,
• rapid feedback,
• reversibility,
• exploration,
• replacing language with action.
One representation of HCI’s disciplinary
domain
•
David Joyner, Georgia Tech
HCI’s Screen Focus – UI Design
• For many years, human-computer interaction was largely about user
interface design
• The earliest innovations in HCI were inventing things like the light pen,
the first computer mouse, which allow for flexible interaction with
things on screen
Goals
• Supporting Interactions
• Human – Computer
• Human – task – Computer
• Make the interface as invisible as possible so that humans can focus
on tasks
• Realistically speaking, interfaces will be visible so how do you design
interfaces that will support users in executing tasks instead of being
the focus?
Principles for User-Task-Interface
Emerge
User of metaphors: eg. Desktop
Pictorial representations or Icons: Documents,
folders, Menu functions
Invisible and hence usable system: interactions
that deal with files, not programs
Replace sequential programming of command
Xerox Star workstation line interfaces (language) with action (e.g. drag
and drop)
Interaction Design
• Interaction: Users + Interface
• Designing tasks
• How people accomplish their goals and not just the interface that
they use to accomplish their goals
E.g. How do you improve mobile
hotspot sharing experience for
Samsung users?
Users
• Total 37 participants
• 28/37 participants are Males
• 23/27 participants belong to the age-group of 21-30
• 21/37 participants - Low Income
• Security Guards
• Small shop workers/owner
• Gig workers
UI Mapping
Design Recommendation: Temporary Hotspot
New Features in Samsung Phones:
Monitor data sharing
Hotspot Weekly and Monthly Usage
Report
Set sharing limits: Time, Data
One Time Password for Connecting
Devices
Subcommittees at the CHI
conference
ACM CHI (Computer Human Interaction) is the top ranked conference in
Human Computer Interaction
1. Accessibility and Aging 9. Interacting with Devices:
2. Blending Interaction: Engineering Interaction Techniques &
Interactive Systems & Tools Modalities
3. Developing Novel Devices: Hardware, 10. Interaction Beyond the Individual
Materials, and Fabrication 11. Learning, Education, and Families
4. Computational Interaction
12. Privacy and Security
5. Critical Computing, Sustainability, and
Social Justice 13. Specific Applications Areas
6. Design 14. Understanding People
7. Games and Play 15. User Experience and Usability
8. Health 16. Visualization
First Wave of HCI
• Draws from cognitive science and human factors
• Focused on the human being as a subject to be studied through rigid
guidelines, formal methods, and systematic testing
• Framed in terms of specifying the requirements for a single user
interacting with a screen-based interface
Focus was on a single user and desktop computer in an
office setting
First wave of HCI
• Inspired by industrial engineering and ergonomics
• Task analytic and usability methods developed based on an individual
user’s cognitive capabilities
• The acronym WIMP was used as a way of characterizing the core
features of an interface for a single user: this stood for Windows,
Icons, Menus, and Pointer
• This was later superseded by the GUI (graphical user interface)
The Ideal User
• Mastery of the system
• Competence in task performance
• Ease in learning the system
• Assimilating advanced features
• Confidence in their capacity to retain mastery over time
• Enjoyment in using the system
• Eagerness to show it off to novices, and
• Desire to explore more powerful aspects of the system.
Critique of people as ‘users’
• The users as office workers have several tasks to perform and they
may not use the computer for all the tasks
• Emphasis on designing one particular application and forgetting that
the user has varied needs that do not always involve the computer
• Focusing on people simply as users can also blind us to the fact that
the "users" view of the technology we are developing may be very
different to that of the designer's view
Second wave of HCI
• Support office workers in their activities, rather than building office
automation systems
• Focus moved to groups working with a collection of applications
• Emphasis on work settings and interaction within well-established
communities of practice
• Design to support cooperation, learning, and participation
• The ACM CSCW (Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social
Computing) is the second ranked conference in HCI
How does work get done?
Actions are taken in the context of particular, concrete
circumstances
Second Wave of HCI
• Studying context of the use became important
• Support office workers in their activities, rather than building office
automation systems
• Laboratory studies were mostly abandoned
• Qualitative research such as a variety of participatory design
workshops, prototyping and contextual inquiries began gaining
ground
Third wave of HCI
• Computers occupy both the private and public spheres
• Technology spreads from the workplace to homes and everyday lives
and culture
• New elements of human life are included in the human-computer
interaction such as culture, emotion and experience
• Focus of the third wave broadens to include use contexts that are
non-work, non-purposeful, non-rational
• Issues about culture, emotion, home, play
Diverse technologies and modalities
co-exist
• The emergence of pervasive technologies, augmented reality, small
interfaces, tangible interfaces
• Interfaces become mobile and used in changing locations and
contexts
• Different tasks are done through a combination of specialized
technologies instead of centralizing capabilities into a single compute
• Input/Output modalities emerge, e.g. gestures; however they are still
at an exploratory stage
Third Wave of HCI
• Multiplicity of Interaction
• Changing use contexts
• Non-work is special
• Expands focus from work to include life
• Notion of boundaries
• Emotion, Experience and Reflexivity
• Focus on non-work and motivation
• Technology as something that is experienced
• Emotional quality of action and interaction
• Emphasis on creative, open, relational, and participating in felt
experience
Fourth wave of HCI?
• Domains, topics and user experiences being studied have diversified
• Things are changing all the time so many of the ways of doing design
are new
• The focus is no longer about human-computer interaction per se, but
more about the creation of intuitive, simple, transparent interaction
designs which allow people to easily express themselves through
various computationally enhanced tools and media
• Global challenges that previously were considered the realms of
government and politics are now being promoted as major research
topics for HCI: e.g. reducing global poverty, food insecurity, refugee
populations
• Subjects that would have been considered taboo are analyzed
including technology-enhanced sex, women’s sexual and reproductive
functions, religion
HCI is now more expansive about
the boundaries of study
• Then: Originally a confined problem space with a clear focus that
adopted a small set of methods to tackle it — that of designing
computer systems to make them more easy and efficient to use by a
single user
• Now: A more diffuse space with a broader mandate about what to
study, what to design for and which methods to use
Different strokes of ‘HCI’ work
Research Scholarship Industry Practice
XEROX
PARC:
Palo Alto Academia: Microsoft IBM Adobe
Google Facebook Apple TATA Elxi Zomato Dunzo
Research Universities Research Research Research
Centre
