HY-364: Επικοινωνία Ανθρώπου - Μηχανής Slide 1HY-364: Επικοινωνία Ανθρώπου - Μηχανής Slide 1

COURSE CS-364 (OPTIONAL)

HUMAN – COMPUTER INTERACTION

UNIVERSITY OF CRETEFACULTY OF SCIENCES AND ENGINEERING

COMPUTER SCIENCE DEPARTMENT

Our technology evolves rapidly

Our everyday lives involve programmed devices that do not sit on our desk, and these devices are often unusable (e.g. in the past VCRs, car music systems)

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The car that behaves like an operating system

It would die on the freeway for no reason, and you would just accept it, restart, and drive on

It would have a single "This Car Has Performed An Illegal Operation“ warning light

It would ask "Are you sure?" before deploying the airbag system

Every time a new car was introduced car buyers would have to learn how to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car

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Two sides to HCI: Academic / Research discipline▪ Studying people interacting with (computer)

technology▪ computer (as in Human-Computer Interaction) means

not only computers but also anything that uses a computer (from your iPod to your TV to your GPS Navsystem in your car to your car keys)

Design discipline▪ Interaction Design▪ “designing interactive products to support the way

people communicate and interact in their everyday and working lives” (Preece et al, 2011)

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Ergonomics

Psychology /

Cognitive Science

Design

Informatics

Engineering

Computer Science /

Software Engineering

Social Sciences

(e.g. Sociology,

Anthropology)

Ubiquitous

Computing

Academic disciplines

HCI &

Interaction Design

Graphic Design

Product Design

Artist-Design

Industrial Design

Film Industry

Information

Systems

Computer-Supported

Cooperative Work (CSCW)

Design Practices

Interdisciplinary Overlapping Fields

Human

Factors (HF)

Cognitive

EngineeringCognitive

Ergonomics

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.

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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)

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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

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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”

ACM SIGCHI, 1992

Aim:

“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

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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

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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 (e.g., the ergonomics / human factors of fighter plane cockpits)

The history of HCI is presented here in relation to the history of computers and software

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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

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Vannevar BushAs We May ThinkThe Atlantic Monthly

1945

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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

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USyoT_Ha_bAVideo available at:

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, email and hypertext.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfIgzSoTMOs

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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”

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

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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

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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

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Apple Lisa (1983), the first menu bar and window controls

Full video available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W35vpsPIwlU

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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 non-programmer

Increased complexity potential user confusion

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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!

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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

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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

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