What is HCI?

1. What is HCI? Material from 0657.425/525 Human Computer Interaction Dr Steve Jones

2. Social and organizational psychology Ergonomics and human factors Cognitive Psychology Engineering Computer science Design HCI Artificial Intelligence Anthropology Sociology Linguistics Philosophy What is HCI? • the study of all aspects of how people interact with computer hardware and software • it’s multidisciplinary

3. Why is HCI important? • computer technology is pervasive (how many computers have you interacted with today?) • issues of • efficiency • frustration • economy • health • safety

4. Importance of HCI • 3 Mile Island • a light indicated that a valve had been closed when it had not • the light indicator was obscured by a caution tag attached to another valve controller • the alarm system could produce audible and visible warnings for 1500 alarm conditions, but a single acknowledge button turned them all off

5. Importance of HCI The safest way to travel! In 1990 Indian Airlines Flight 605 airbus 320 crashed, killing 98 people. Flight International magazine reported: “this undoubtedly derives from poor understanding between the machine and the pilot, and here the aircraft builders have to do something”. Airbus Industry officials agreed that there was indeed a problem: “the company maintains the problem is the pilots failing to adapt to the automation rather than acknowledging the need for the software to work smoothly with the humans” (Leonard Lee, The Day the Phones Stopped, 1992, p. 42) In 1985 a China Airlines 747 suffered a slow loss of power from its outer right engine. When an engine on a wing goes slower than the others, the plane starts to turn, in this case to the right (technically, this kind of a turn is called “yawing”). But the plane - like most commercial aviation flights - was being controlled by its automatic equipment, in this case, the autopilot, which efficiently compensated for the yaw. The autopilot had no way of knowing that there was a problem with the engine, but it did detect the tendency to turn to the right, which it simply counteracted to keep the plane pointed straight ahead. Eventually, however, the autopilot reached the limit of how much it could control the yaw and could no longer keep the plane stable. So what did it do? Basically, it gave up. Imagine the flight crew. Here they were, flying along quietly and peacefully. They had noticed a problem with that right engine, but while they were taking the preliminary steps to identify the problem and cope with it, suddenly the autopilot gave up on them. The plane rolled and went into a vertical dive of 31,500 feet before it could be recovered. That’s quite a dive: almost six miles! Ten kilometers! And in a 747. The pilots managed to save the plane, but it was severely damaged. Their safe recovery was much in doubt. (Don Norman, Turn Signals are the Facial Expressions of Automobiles).

6. A perspective on HCI

7. Early interaction What were the first interaction devices? • wires, punched tape and cards, switches, teletype, • lights • ENIAC (1943)

8. Early interaction Mark I (1944)

9. Early interaction Stretch (1961)

10. Current devices The range of current devices? • keyboard • light pen, stylus • mouse, touchpad, touch screen, trackball, joystick • microphone • character terminals/bit-mapped screens • audio

11. Future devices? Common use soon? • data gloves/suits (wearable computing) • natural language • head-up displays

12. Key ideas: the Memex The Memex (1945) “As We May Think”, Atlantic Monthly “publication has been extended far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record” • Memex: a device with which • people can store all their books, records, communications etc • items can be retrieved rapidly through indexing, keywords, cross-references, etc • text can be annotated • trails (chains of links) through information can be created • Memex based on microfilm not computers, not implemented

13. Key ideas: symbiosis Man-Computer symbiosis (1960) “The hope is that, in not too many years, human brains and computing machines will be coupled together very tightly and that the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought and process data in a way not approached by the information-handling machines we know today” • Goals: • time sharing of computers among many users • electronic i/o • interactive real time information processing and programming • large scale information storage and retrieval • facilitation of human cooperation in creation of large systems • combined speech recognition, OCR, light-pen • natural language • heuristic programming

14. Key idea: Sketchpad SketchPad (Sutherland, 1963) • Novel features were:

15. Key ideas: AUGMENT Douglas Engelbart • 1963: “Augmenting human intellect”, developed a system called AUGMENT • 1968: NLS (oN Line System) implemented • shared files • personal annotations • electronic messaging • desktop conferencing • shared displays (WYSIWIS) • multiple pointers • modern word processing • hierarchical hypertext • mixed text and graphics documents • one handed, chorded keyboard • high resolution display • windows • specially designed furniture

16. Key ideas: personal computing • Alan Kay (1969) - The Dynabook “Imagine having your own self-contained knowledge manipulator in a portable package the size and shape of an ordinary notebook. Suppose it had enough power to outrace your senses of sight and hearing, enough capacity to store for late retrieval thousands of page-equivalents of reference materials, poems, letters recipes...” • Ted Nelson (1974) • “Computer Lib/Dream Machines” - described what computers could do for people (instead of business) • claims to have had the original idea for many advances in HCI!

17. Key ideas: personal computing • Xerox Parc (mid ‘70s) • Alto personal workstation: local processor, bit-mapped display • mouse • modern graphical interfaces: text and drawing editing, • email • windows, menus, scrollbars, pointers • local area networks for shared resources • Xerox Star workstation (1981) • look up

18. Key ideas: personal computing Personal Computing • Apple Lisa (1983) • based on ideas in Xerox Star • Apple Macintosh (1984) • same ideas - but well done • aggressive pricing • no need to trail blaze • developer’s toolkit for third parts software • user interface guidelines

19. Recent times? 1984- • a great deal of research findings in HCI • a small proportion find their way to the marketplace • dominance of Microsoft