HUMAN COMPUTER INTERACTION. Course Convenor: Constantine Stephanidis

Transcription

1 UNIVERSITY OF CRETE FACULTY OF SCIENCES AND ENGINEERING COMPUTER SCIENCE DEPARTMENT COURSE CS-464 (OPTIONAL) HUMAN COMPUTER INTERACTION Course Convenor: Constantine Stephanidis HY-464: Επικοινωνία Ανθρώπου - Μηχανής Slide 1

2 Our technology evolves rapidly More and more, our everyday lives involve programmed devices that do not sit on our desk, and these devices are often unusable (e.g. VCRs, car radio, etc.) An everyday counter-example: imagine driving a car that would die on the freeway for no reason, and you would just accept it, restart, and drive on would have a single "This Car Has Performed An Illegal Operation warning light would ask "Are you sure?" before deploying the airbag system Slide 2

3 Two sides to HCI: Academic / Research discipline Studying people interacting with (computer) technology Design discipline Designing systems for people: creating technology so that it works right for people Slide 3

4 Ergonomics & Human Factors Social & Organisational Psychology Cognitive Psychology Anthropology Engineering Computer Science HCI Design Sociology Artificial Intelligence Philosophy Semiotics & Linguistics Slide 4

5 The ideal designer of an interactive system would have expertise in a range of topics: Psychology and cognitive science to be aware of the user s perceptual, cognitive and problem-solving skills Ergonomics for the user s physical capabilities Sociology to understand the wider context of the interaction Computer science and engineering to be able to build the necessary technology Business to be able to market it Graphic design to produce an effective interface presentation Technical writing to produce the manuals etc. Slide 5

6 Useful Functional, supporting users task goals E.g., a phone can make phone calls, handle text messages and take pictures Usable (the heart of HCI) Easy to use, does the right things at the right time, enjoyable Part of what user experience is Used It must be used by people Attractive, available, acceptable If not, all the designer s wonderful work goes to waste (except for the lessons learned in the process) Slide 6

7 Computers and related devices have to be designed with an understanding that people with specific tasks in mind will want to use them in a way that is seamless with respect to their everyday work The design is not something that can be plugged in at the last minute It should be developed integrally with the rest of the system We therefore need to consider how HCI fits into the system design process Slide 7

8 Definition : 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 Aim: ACM SIGCHI, 1992 The aim of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) is to develop or improve the safety, utility, effectiveness, efficiency and usability of systems that include computers Interacting with Computers, 1989, p.3 Slide 8

9 At present, there is no general and unified theory of HCI. However, there is an underlying principle: People use computers to accomplish tasks This outlines the three major issues of concern in HCI: the people, the computers and the tasks that are performed The system must support the user s task, which results in a fourth focus, usability Slide 9

10 The term Human Computer Interaction has only been in widespread use since the early 1980s, but it has its roots in more established disciplines Systematic study of human performance began at the beginning of the last century in factories, with an emphasis on manual tasks The Second World War provided impetus for studying the interaction between humans and machines, as each side strove to produce more effective weapons systems The history of HCI is presented here in relation to the history of computers and software Slide 10

11 The human factors issues were how to format the printouts of their programs so they were easy to read and debug, especially given the constraint of line printers that could only present alphanumeric characters in a single font with 80-character lines and limited formatting capabilities Slide 11

12 Vannevar Bush As We May Think The Atlantic Monthly 1945 Slide 12

13 Video available at: Sketchpad (1963) First GUI interface Used the novel light pen for input First computer graphics (ancestor of CAD) First use of objects and instances, the concepts of modern OOP Influenced by the Memex Slide 13

14 Demonstration of The NLS (on-line System) by Douglas Engelbart at Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Fransisco The demo featured the first computer mouse the public had ever seen, as well as introducing interactive text, video conferencing, teleconferencing, and hypertext. Slide 14

15 Proposes a Psychological Research Unit: a psychological laboratory within a computer science oriented industrial research laboratory [ ] Xerox Research Laboratory. almost no effort goes into understanding the nature of the human user Slide 15

16 Late 1960s marked the end of the era of small independent machines and introduced the era of time-shared computer resources With light loads of work, the software/hardware infrastructure worked well for several individuals programs and memory allocations Under heavy use, the machine began spending more time swapping users work in and out than it did getting the actual users processing accomplished This lead to a flurry of HCI activity characterizing the taxonomy of system-induced time delays and research on how time delays affected user behaviour Slide 16

17 Geographically dispersed organizations leased telephone lines to perform online transaction processing Substantial delays before replies to a query This constraint launched the concept of screen of information User-oriented design principles that could be applied to the design of the screens were introduced Slide 17

18 Xerox Alto (1973), the first system to pull together all of the elements of the modern Graphical User Interface Xerox Star (1981), the first system to use a fully integrated desktop metaphor and application suite Slide 18

19 Apple Lisa (1983), the first menu bar and window controls Full video available at: Slide 19

20 The mouse, interactive device of choice, supplements the keyboard Windows (overlapping, resizable) Icons (clickable, drag and drop) Menus Clean separation of user interface code and application code Intuitive. The computer is now accessible to the nonprogrammer Increased complexity potential user confusion Slide 20

21 This would be characterized as the era of the Internet In 1980, Tim Berners-Lee, a researcher at CERN, first described the idea for a hypertext/hypermedia information management system to facilitate sharing and updating information among researchers. By 1989, CERN was the largest Internet node in Europe The truly huge explosion occurred in 1993 with the release of the first graphical browser for the World Wide Web: The NCSA Mosaic The WWW was now usable and exciting! Slide 21

22 This would be characterized as the era of the mobile devices Mobile phones to iphones Laptops Smartphones Tablets Social Media and Apps -10s Ambient Intelligence Augmented Reality Slide 22

23 User Interfaces Design guidelines and standards The design and development of interactive systems Documentation, user training, user support Usability measurement and testing Work organisation and social issues Requirements of special populations (e.g., disabled people) Cultural and international issues Safety and health aspects of computing Programming and software engineering Computer assisted group work Ubiquitous computing Slide 23

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