INTRODUCTION TO HCI

Some History of HCI

Some History of HCI Vannevar Bush, 1945 “As We May Think” Vision of post-war activities, Memex “…when one of these items is in view, the other can be instantly recalled merely by tapping a button” an American engineer, inventor and science administrator, who during World War II headed the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD). He is credited for development of the Memex, an early version of hypertext

Some History of HCI Douglas Engelbart, 1962 “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework” In 1968, workstation with a mouse, links across documents, chorded keyboard Douglas Engelbart is credited for coming up with early versions of the Internet and the mouse at Augmented Research Centre

Some History of HCI Apple LISA and Mac XEROX (PARC) Alto and Star Inexpensive High-quality graphics 3rd party applications XEROX (PARC) Alto and Star Windows Menus Scrollbars Pointing Consistency OOP Networked

Future of HCI Large displays Small displays Peripheral displays Alternative I/O Ubiquitous computing Virtual environments Augmented Reality Speech recognition Multimedia Media space Artificial intelligence Software agents Games ...

Human-Computer Interaction What is HCI? Human-Computer Interaction “Human-computer interaction is a discipline concerned with the design, evaluation and implementation of interactive computing systems for human use, and with the study of major phenomena surrounding them." -ACM SIGCHI

What is HCI? Simply put: HCI is the study of how people interact with computers including mobile devices and related systems and to what extent computers and related systems are or are not developed for successful interaction with human beings

An example: HomeFinder

Apartments.com

Hit List

HomeFinder

The Goal of HCI Usability task People are trying to accomplish their tasks in life. (system independent) Introduce a system, User Interface should maximize their ability. task system person

Usability Engineering Reqs Analysis Design Evaluate Develop A process for HCI production to ensure usability goals are met

Usability Engineering Reqs Analysis Design Evaluate Develop many iterations

2. Who Cares? Everyone, because: 1-Everything is a User Interface 2- The User Interface is Everything

Doors

More Doors

Oldies Care!                                                                                                                                                                                        Human error: Who’s fault is it?

Human Computer Interaction Contexts Organization & Business Context When computers first appeared (1950s), they were: very difficult to use, cumbersome & at times unpredictable very large & expensive machines used only by technical specialists Little was known about how to make them easier to use During the past 66 years, technology has advanced so much that almost everyone today comes in contact with computers ATMS, watches, Cell phones, remote controls, VCR, medical equipment, etc.

Organization & Business Context cont.. they’ve become much less expensive, users come from every walk of life & we understand a great deal more about how to fit them to people’s needs & work Dramatic decrease in cost due to technological advances - the ability to miniaturize circuits but also to pack large number of them on tiny, individual chips paved way for develop’t of powerful computers Develop’t of first PC in 1970s provided interactive computing power for individual users at low cost Consequently, people from all walks of life began using computer systems

The Changing Face of Computer Use 2000+ Professional programmers, “software psychology” Business professionals, mainframes, command-line Large, diverse user groups, “the computer for the rest of us” World Wide Web and more, information access & overload Ubiquitous computing, diversity in task, device, …

Organization & Business Context cont.. Life without computer equal/ close to life without electricity As computers are penetrating in our daily life, it has some results: enabling new discoveries Leading to efficiencies, Making our life easy and convenient On the not so bright side: Annoying, infuriating, even killing a few of us. In turn, we’ll be tempted to kill them, but we won’t b’se they make modern life possible. We’ll instead have to think how we can make them better Rethink the relationship in deep & novel ways, for the fault for our escalating problems lies not with our machines, but with us. Could pick two stories/accidents for reading in groups and presenting to the rest of the class who was to blame and why? And what should be done to avoid similar happenings in future?  

Role of HCI Bridges gap btn interfaces of machines & human understanding A discipline concerned with the design, evaluation &implementation of interactive computing systems for human use & with the study of major phenomena surrounding them” -ACM/IEEE Software Engineering & HCI HCIers user-centered but software engineers system-centered SEs are useful for specifying & building the functional aspects of a software system HCI interfaces emphasize a deep understanding of user characteristics & tasks a user must perform HCIers test design ideas on real users & use formal evaluation techniques to replace intuition in guiding design Joke in Computer Industry-for end of day reflection

Examples of Bad Tools due to poor Interaction Design In flight entertainment failure leading to huge losses of revenue (one difficult to operate and another linked movie delivery with the cash collection function) SEs believe in technology & have faith that only some new technology, like voice recognition, will improve the user’s experience Problem is culture, training & attitude of people who make systems, not chips & programming languages used High-tech industry has inadvertently put programmers & engineers in charge, so their hard-to-use engineering culture dominates Despite appearances, business executives are not in control

Success Criteria in the New Economy The successful professional for 21st century is either a business savvy technologist or a technology-savvy business person. Former knows that his success is dependent on the quality of information available & the sophistication with which he uses it. Later is an entrepreneurial engineer or scientist trained for technology, but possessing a knee business sense & an awareness of the power of information. Example The site is aesthetically beautiful, no flaw technically & has wonderful animated content. But if the user is unable to find desired info about products, It’s useless from the business point of view e.g. websites of airlines without flight, prices & contact info

Some Facts Users can only find information 42% of the time (Jared Spool) 62% of web shoppers give up looking for the item they want to buy online ( Zona Research) 50% of the potential sales from a site are lost because people cannot find the item they are looking for (Forrester Research) 40% of the users who do not return to a site do so because their first visit resulted in a negative experience (Forrester Research) 80% of software lifecycle costs occur due to unmet user requirements (IEEE ) Aprox.63% of software projects exceed their cost estimates due to poor requirements analysis (Communications of the ACM) Poor commercial web sites will kill 80% of Fortune 500 companies within a decade – (Jakob Nielsen)

Goals of HCI HCI was adopted in 1980 concerned with all aspects that relate to the interaction between users and computers. Goals of HCI are to produce usable and safe systems, as well as functional systems- ‘to develop or improve the safety, utility, effectiveness, efficiency and usability of systems that include computers’ (Interacting with computers, 1989). The goals of HCI are to produce usable and safe systems, as well as functional systems. These goals can be summarized as ‘to develop or improve the safety, utility, effectiveness, efficiency and usability of systems that include computers’ (Interacting with computers, 1989).

Goals of HCI Cont... Usability is generally regarded as ensuring that interactive products are easy to learn, effective to use, and enjoyable from user perspective. More specifically, usability is broken down into the following goals: . Effective to use (effectiveness) . Efficient to use (efficiency) . Safe to use(safety) . Have good utility (utility) Easy to learn (learnability) . Easy to remember how to use (memorability)

User Experience goals The goals of designing interactive products to be fun, enjoyable, pleasurable, aesthetically pleasing and so on are concerned primarily with the user experience As well as focusing primarily on improving efficiency and productivity at work, interaction design is increasingly concerning itself with creating systems that are: Satisfying, Enjoyable, Fun/ Entertaining Helpful/Motivating Aesthetically pleasing Supportive of creativity Rewarding/ Emotionally fulfilling The goals of designing interactive products to be fun, enjoyable, pleasurable, aesthetically pleasing and so on are concerned primarily with the user experience

Usability maximisation Why is it so hard?

Usability is hard People (users) are all different People are unpredictable Design skill isn’t enough Evaluation with users is required Designer’s pride New ways to think, break out of the box Programmers still don’t think that Usability is that important

Usability is hard know the software internals, technology first enjoy systems more than people arrogant (my software!)

What will I learn? Task analysis Ethnography Reqs Analysis Usability studies Controlled experiments Design Evaluate Activity design Information design Interaction design Develop GUI programming Widgets, graphics, animation

References & Further Reading Human Computer Interaction Free online Book retrieved on 26th Aug. 2010 from http://www.zainbooks.com/books/computer-sciences/human-computer-interaction.html (chap.1) Human-Computer Interaction: Overview on State of the Art by Fakhreddine et al.