01-01 · Week 1
What HCI is and why interfaces matter
The SIGCHI definition of HCI, why the field runs studies, who contributes to it, and why a poor user interface is expensive.
- State the ACM SIGCHI (1992) definition of HCI and break it into its parts.
- List the four reasons the lecture gives for performing HCI studies.
- Name the disciplines that feed HCI and the advantage and disadvantage of a multi-disciplinary team.
- Explain why user interfaces decide whether a product succeeds.
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HCI is the design, evaluation and implementation of systems for people
Intuition
Every time a booking form rejects your input with no explanation, you are on the receiving end of a human-computer interaction problem. HCI is the field that asks why that happened and how to prevent it.
Lecture 1 quotes the ACM SIGCHI Curricula for Human-Computer Interaction (1992). HCI 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. The phrase “for human use” is the anchor: the system is judged by what people can do with it.
The lecture opened with two example research papers from the CHI 2017 conference. Bentley, Daskalova and Andalibi studied how consumers’ email behaviour has changed. Yi and colleagues built Compass, a rotational keyboard for smartwatches without touch input. One paper studies people and a technology that already exists. The other invents a new way to interact. Both count as HCI.
Exam detail
Four reasons for HCI studies (Lecture 1): understand good ways of interaction and why they succeed, design and develop good user interfaces, evaluate the quality of a user interface, and improve interfaces and develop new ways of interaction.
The SIGCHI definition has four parts: design, evaluation, implementation, and the study of major phenomena surrounding interactive systems.
Many disciplines contribute, which helps and hurts
HCI draws on human factors, psychology and cognition, computer science, engineering, ergonomics and social science. The lecture gives one trade-off. Different disciplines bring different knowledge, so the team understands the problem better and produces more ideas and designs. The cost is communication: people trained in different fields use different words for the same thing.
Pitfall
Do not answer “multi-disciplinary” questions with only the advantage. The slide lists one advantage group (knowledge, more ideas) and one disadvantage (communication challenges), and an exam option can swap them.
A bad interface costs time, money and lives
The lecture gives four reasons the interface deserves attention. It directly influences the success of a product. It is one of the most critical parts of a system. It is hard to get right. And bad interfaces are costly in time, money and lives. The last point connects to later weeks on safety-critical activity (Week 3) and on error prevention (Week 1 design rules).
Optional aside
Lecture 1 also covers unit admin: the six learning outcomes, the weekly routine (lecture, then workshop), the group project and three reflective summaries, and the 5th edition of Sharp, Preece and Rogers as the main reference book. This is context for planning your study, not material the sample exam questions touch. The separate admin slides were not part of this topic.
Recall
Give the four elements of the SIGCHI definition of HCI.
Design, evaluation and implementation of interactive computing systems for human use, plus the study of major phenomena surrounding them.