MODULE 1: SURVEY OF HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION

CONCEPTS, THEORIES AND PRACTICE

UNIT 1 CONCEPTS, THEORIES AND HISTORY

CONTENTS
1.0 Introduction
2.0 Objectives
3.0 Main Content
3.1 Definition of Human Computer Interaction
3.2 Overview of Human Computer Interaction
3.2.1 The goals of HCI Studies:
3.2.2 Research
3. 3 Interaction technique
3.4 Interaction styles
3.5 Paradigms and History
3.5.1 Paradigms of interaction
3.5.2 The History of Paradigm Shifts
3.5. 3 History of Basic Interactions
4.0 Conclusion
5.0 Summary
6.0 Tutor Marked Assignment
7.0 Further Reading/References

1.0 INTRODUCTION

This unit introduces you to the basic concepts of Human-computer interaction and the theories
driving it. It is meant as an overview towards appreciating the early efforts made to improve
upon human computer interaction. It therefore discusses the history, and the paradigm shifts. It
is meant to provide a general background for the understanding and design of Human-computer
interaction.

2.0 OBJECTIVES

By the end of this unit, you should be able to

• Understand the concepts of Human-computer interaction
• Express the goals of Human-computer interaction research and study
• Explain Human-computer interaction technique
• Understand the history and paradigms of Human-computer interaction

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 3.0 MAIN CONTENT

3.1 Definition
The following definition is given by the Association for Computing Machinery
"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."

Because of the interaction that occurs between users and computers at the interface of
software and hardware such as between computer peripherals and large-scale mechanical
systems in aircraft and power plants, human-computer interaction is the study of that
interaction between people (otherwise called users) and computers. It can also be regarded
as the intersection of computer science, behavioral sciences, design and several other fields
of study.

3.2 Overview
Since human-computer interaction studies a human and a machine in conjunction, it
draws from supporting knowledge on both the machine and the human side. On the
machine side, techniques in computer graphics, operating systems, programming
languages, and development environments are relevant. On the human side,
communication theory, graphic and industrial design disciplines, linguistics, social
sciences, cognitive psychology, and human performance are relevant. Engineering and
design methods are also relevant.
The multidisciplinary nature of HCI enables people with different backgrounds contribute to
its success. HCI is also sometimes referred to as man—machine interaction (MMI) or
computer—human interaction (CHI).

2.1 The goals of HCI Studies:

A basic goal of HCI study is to improve the interactions between users and computers
by making computers more usable and receptive to the user's needs in the following
ways:

− Methodologies and processes for designing interfaces in their related styles (i.e., given a task
and a class of users, design the best possible interface within given constraints, optimizing
for a desired property such as learn ability or efficiency of use)
− Methods or techniques for implementing interfaces (e.g. software toolkits and
libraries; efficient
algorithms)
− Techniques for evaluating and comparing interfaces
− Developing new interfaces and interaction techniques
− Developing descriptive and predictive models and theories of interaction
− Design systems that minimize the barrier between the human's cognitive model of what
they want to
accomplish and the computer's understanding of the user's task.

2.2 Research

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Part of research in human-computer interaction involves exploring easier-to-learn or more
efficient interaction techniques for common computing tasks. This includes inventing new
techniques and comparing existing techniques using the scientific method as follows:
1. Designing graphical user interfaces and web interfaces.
2. Developing new design methodologies,
3. Experimenting with new hardware devices,
4. Prototyping new software systems,
5. Exploring new paradigms for interaction, and
6. Developing models and theories of interaction.

3. 3 Interaction technique

An interaction technique or user interface technique is a combination of input and

output consisting of hardware and software elements that provides a way for
computer users to accomplish a simple task. For example, one can go back to the
previously visited page on a Web browser by either clicking a button, hitting a key,
performing a mouse gesture or uttering a speech command.

The computing perspective of interaction technique:

Here, an interaction technique involves one or several physical input devices, including
a piece of code which interprets user input into higher-level commands, possibly
producing user feedback and one or several physical output devices.
Consider for example, the process of deleting a file using a contextual menu. This first
requires a mouse and a screen (input/output devices the user clicks on the "delete"
item (interpretation).

The user view of interaction technique:

Here, an interaction technique is a way). Then, a piece of code needs to paint the
contextual menu on the screen and animate the selection when the mouse moves
(user feedback). The software also needs to send a command to the file system when
to perform a simple computing task and can be described by the way of instructions
or usage scenarios. For example "right-click on the file you want to delete, then click
on the delete item".

The conceptual view of interaction technique:

Here, an interaction technique is an idea and a way to solve a particular user
interface design problem. It does not always need to be bound to a specific
input or output device. For example, menus can be controlled with many sorts
of pointing devices.
Interaction techniques as conceptual ideas can be refined, extended, modified and
combined. For example, pie menus are a radial variant of contextual menus. Marking
menus combine pie menus with gestures. In general, a user interface can be seen as
a combination of many interaction techniques, some of which are not necessarily
widgets.

3.4 Interaction styles

Interaction techniques that share the same metaphor or design principles can be seen
as belonging to the same interaction style. Examples are command line and direct
manipulation user interfaces. More details are provided in subsequent chapter of
this guide.

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 3.5 Paradigms and History
Paradigms are predominant theoretical frameworks or scientific world views such as
the Aristotelian, Newtonian, and Einsteinian (relativistic) paradigms in physics
Understanding HCI history is largely about understanding a series of paradigm
shifts.

3.5.1 Paradigms of interaction

Paradigms of interaction conceptually outline the arrival of new technologies creating a new
perception of
the human-computer relationship.Some of these paradigms shifts can be traced in the
history of interactive technologies as follows:
Batch processing
Timesharing
Networking
Graphical display
Microprocessor
World Wide Web (WWW)
Ubiquitous computing

The initial paradigm started with batch processing that signified impersonal comuting
The paradigm shifts commenced fron timesharing processing system that signifinified an
interactive computing.
This was followed by another paradigm shift in networking that represented a community
computing.The graphical display was an innovation whose era indicated a paradigm shift to
direct manipulation of devices.The Micro processor innovation ided opportunity for personal
computing as an example of another prov paradigm shift.
The World Wide Web (www) turned the world into a global village by creating environment for
a global information access and transmission .This represents a significat paradigm shift in the
life of educated humans all over the world.
Ubiquitous computing can be regarded as another paradigm shift as it is presently a symbiosis
of physical and electronic worlds in service of everday activities.

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 Pictorial representations of the shifts are illustrated below:

The world wide web Ubiquitous Computing

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 Theimagecannotbedisplayed.Yourcomputermaynothaveenoughmemorytoopentheimage,ortheimagemayhavebeencorrupted.Restartyourcomputer,andthenopenthefileagain.Iftheredxstillappears,youmayhavetodeletetheimageandtheninsrtitagain.

Figure 1: Approximate time lines showing where work was performed on some
major technologies. .

5.2 The History of Paradigm Shifts

Time-sharing:
1940s and 1950s witnessed explosive technological growth in computing and in 1960s , there
was the need to channel the power.
Hence J.C.R. Licklider at ARPA introduced the single computer that supported multiple
users.

Video Display Units:

Video Display Units provided more suitable medium than paper and so in 1962, Sutherland
introduced the Sketchpad computers for visualizing and manipulating data. So, one person's
contribution drastically changed the history of computing.

Programming toolkits
Engelbart at Stanford Research Institute in 1968 augmented man's intellect by demonstrating
the NLS Augment system. This became the right programming toolkit that provided the
building blocks to produce complex interactive systems.

Personal computing:
The era of personal computing came on board in 1970s with the introduction of the
Papert's LOGO language for simple graphics programming by children. This system
became popular as it became easier to use.
The era of computing in small but powerful machines dedicated to the individual was
witnessed such as was demonstrated by Kay at Xerox PARC with the Dyna-book as the
ultimate personal computer.

The Window systems and the WIMP interface:

The Window systems and the WIMP interface enabled humans to pursue more than one task
at a time such as in the windows used for dialogue partitioning, to "change a topic". This
became a reality in 1981
with the Xerox Star as the first commercial windowing system comprising windows, icons, menus
and pointers (WIMPs) as familiar interaction mechanisms.

Direct manipulation
In 1982, Shneiderman improved upon direct manipulation of objects on the computer by
introducing a graphically-based interaction of visibility of objects. This provided incremental
action and rapid feedback, its reversibility facility encouraged exploration and syntactic
correctness of all actions. It replaced language with action.
In 1984 using the Apple Macintosh , the model-world metaphor 'What You See Is What You Get
(WYSIWYG) ' became popular.
This related Language with action to confirm that actions do not always speak louder than
words! The direct manipulation interface replaced underlying system of language paradigm and
interface as mediator. The interface acted as the intelligent agent since programming by
example is both action and language.

Hypertext
In 1945, Vannevar Bush and the Memex gave the computing world the key to success in
managing explosion of information by introducing the hypertext. In mid 1960s, Ted Nelson
described hypertext as non-linear browsing structure.
Within the same period, Nelson Xanadu started a project on hypermedia and multimedia;
this gave bedrock for research in this area.
In the World Wide Web, the Hypertext, as originally realized, was a closed system. It comprises
simple, universal protocols (e.g. HTTP) and mark-up languages (e.g. HTML) that made publishing
and accessing easy. It allowed emancipation of critical mass of users that led to a complete
transformation of our information economy.
Applying hypertext technology to browsers allows one to traverse a link across the world with a click
of the mouse.

.5. 3 History of Basic Interactions

The Mouse: The mouse was developed at Stanford Research Laboratory in 1965 as part of the NLS
project to be a cheap replacement for light-pens, which had been used at least since 1954. Many
of the current uses of the mouse were demonstrated by Doug Engelbart as part of NLS in a movie
created in 1968
Drawing programs: Much of the current technology was demonstrated in Sutherland's 196 3
Sketchpad system. The use of a mouse for graphics was demonstrated in NLS (1965). In 1968
Ken Pulfer and Grant Bechthold at the National Research Council of Canada built a mouse out of
wood patterned after Engelbart's and used it with a key-frame animation system to draw all the
frames of a movie.
Text Editing: In 1962 at the Stanford Research Lab, Engelbart proposed, and later implemented a
word processor with automatic word wrap, search and replace, user-definable macros, scrolling
text, and commands to move, copy, and delete characters, words, or blocks of text. Xerox PARC's
Bravo was the first WYSIWYG editor-formatter developed in 1974. It was designed by Butler
Lampson and Charles Simonyi who had started working on these concepts around 1970 while at
Berkeley. The first commercial WYSIWYG editors were the Star, LisaWrite and then MacWrite.

Spreadsheets: The initial spreadsheet was VisiCalc which was developed by Frankston and
Bricklin between 1977 and 1978 for the Apple II while they were students at MIT and the
Harvard Business School. The solver was based on a dependency-directed backtracking
algorithm by Sussman and Stallman at the MIT AI Lab.
Computer Aided Design (CAD): The same 196 3 IFIPS conference at which Sketchpad was
presented also contained a number of CAD systems, including Doug Ross's Computer-Aided
Design Project at MIT in the Electronic Systems Lab and Coons' work at MIT with SketchPad.
Timothy Johnson's pioneering work on the interactive 3D CAD system Sketchpad 3 was his 196 3
MIT MS thesis.

Video Games: The first graphical video game was probably SpaceWar by Slug Russel of MIT in
1962 for the PDP-1 including the first computer joysticks. The early computer Adventure game
was created by Will Crowther at BBN, and Don Woods developed this into a more sophisticated
Adventure game at Stanford in 1966 Conway's game of LIFE was implemented on computers at
MIT and Stanford in 1970.

Gesture Recognition: The first pen-based input device, the RAND tablet, was funded by ARPA.
Sketchpad used light-pen gestures (196 3). Teitelman in 1964 developed the first trainable
gesture recognizer. A very early demonstration of gesture recognition was Tom Ellis' GRAIL
system on the RAND tablet in 1964,. It was quite common in light-pen-based systems to include
some gesture recognition. A gesture-based text editor using proof-reading symbols was
developed at CMU by Michael Coleman in 1969. Gesture recognition has been used in commercial
CAD systems since the 1970s
.
Multi-Media: The FRESS project at Brown used multiple windows and integrated text and
graphics in 1968. The Interactive Graphical Documents project at Brown was the first hypermedia
(as opposed to hypertext) system, and used raster graphics and text, but not video between
1979 and 198 3.. The Movie Manual at the Architecture Machine Group (MIT) was one of the first
to demonstrate mixed video and computer graphics in 198 3

3-D: The first 3-D system was probably Timothy Johnson's 3-D CAD system in 196 3. The
"Lincoln Wand" by Larry Roberts was an ultrasonic 3D location sensing system, developed at
Lincoln Labs in 1966. That system also had the first interactive 3-D hidden line elimination. An
early use was for molecular modeling. Also, the military-industrial flight simulation work of
between the 60's and the 70's led the way to making 3-D real-time with commercial systems
from some firms.
Virtual Reality and "Augmented Reality": The original work on VR was performed by Ivan
Sutherland when he was at Harvard between 1965 and 1968.

Computer Supported Cooperative Work. Doug Engelbart's 1968 demonstration of NLS

included the remote participation of multiple people at various sites. Electronic mail, still the
most widespread multi- user software, was enabled by the ARPAnet, which became operational
in 1969, and by the Ethernet from Xerox PARC in 197 3. An early computer conferencing
system was Turoff's EIES system at the New Jersey Institute of Technology in 1975.
Natural language and speech: The fundamental research for speech and natural language
understanding and generation has been performed at CMU, MIT, SRI, BBN, IBM, AT&T Bell Labs
and BellCore, much of it government funded.

Software Tools and Architectures

The area of user interface software tools is quite active now, and many companies are selling
tools. Most of today's applications are implemented using various forms of software tools.

UIMSs and Toolkits: The first User Interface Management System (UIMS) was William
Newman's Reaction Handler created at Imperial College, London between 1966 and 1967. Most
of the early work was done at the university of Toronto, George Washington University and
Brigham Young University. Early window managers such as Smalltalk developed in 1974 and
InterLisp, both from Xerox PARC, came with a few widgets, such as popup menus and
scrollbars. The Xerox Star of 1981 was the first commercial system to have a large collection of
widgets.
The Apple Macintosh (1984) was the first to actively promote its toolkit for use by other
developers to enforce a consistent interface Interface Builders: These are interactive tools that
allow interfaces composed of widgets such as buttons, menus and scrollbars to be placed
using a mouse. The Steamer project at BBN carried out between 1979 and 1985 was probably
the first object-oriented graphics system. Trillium was developed at Xerox PARC in 1981.
Another early interface builder was the MenuLay system and was developed by Bill Buxton at
the University of Toronto in 198 3. The Macintosh in 1984 included a "Resource Editor" which
allowed widgets to be placed and edited. Jean-Marie Hullot created "SOS Interface" in Lisp
for the Macintosh while working at INRIA in 1984.

Component Architectures: The idea of creating interfaces by connecting separately written

components was first demonstrated in the Andrew project by Carnegie Mellon University's
Information Technology Center in 198 3. It is widely popularized by Microsoft's OLE and Apple's
OpenDoc architectures.

Multimodality
A mode is a human communication channel. Hence multimodality places emphasis on
simultaneous use of multiple channels for input and output.

Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW)

The Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) removes bias of single user with single
computer system but one can not neglect the social aspects.
Electronic mail is most prominent success of Computer Supported Cooperative Work.

Agent-based Interfaces
Agent-based Interfaces are original interfaces with commands given to computer and it is
language-based. It involves direct manipulation using the WIMP interface. Commands are
performed on "world" representation
and it is aaction based.
The agents return to the language by instilling proactively and "intelligence" in command
processor. Example is found in Avatars, a natural language processor.
Ubiquitous Computing:
One example of ubiquitous computing is the ubiquitous graphical interface used by Microsoft
Windows 95, which is based on the Macintosh, which is based on work at Xerox PARC, which
in turn is based on early research at the Stanford Research Laboratory (now SRI) and at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Virtually all software written today employs user
interface toolkits and interface builders, concepts which were developed first at universities.
The spectacular growth of the World-Wide Web is also a direct result of HCI research.
Interface
Computers will communicate through high speed local networks, nationally over wide-area
networks, and portably via infrared, ultrasonic, cellular, and other technologies. Data and
computational improvements more than anything else has triggered this explosive
growth.services will be portably accessible from many if not most locations to which a user
travels.

Sensor-based and Context-aware Interaction

Humans are good at recognizing the "context" of a situation and reacting appropriatzz, identity)
becoming easier Sensors utilized the concept of senses of physical measures to interactions that
behave as if made "aware" of the surroundings.

Metaphor
The LOGO's turtle dragging its tail enabled an effective teaching technique with file management
on an office desktop, word processing for typing, and financial analysis using the spreadsheets
The problems with metaphors are that some tasks do not fit into a given metaphor while some can
be culturally biased.

4.0 Conclusion
The study of paradigms is concerned about how an interactive system is developed to ensure its
usability and how that usability can be demonstrated or measured.
The history of interactive system design also provides paradigms for usable designs
Paradigms of interaction conceptually outline the arrival of new technologies creating a new
perception of the human-computer relationship. Understanding Human-computer interaction
history is largely about understanding a series of paradigm shifts.
Some of these paradigms shifts can be traced in the history of interactive technologies as outlined.

5.0 Summary
Human Computer Interaction is the interaction between computer users and its interface of
software and hardware.
Its study requires the knowledge of computer graphics, operating systems, programming
languages, cognitive psychology, and human performance among others.
The study of HCI paradigms concerns its development while the history concerns the
understanding of the paradigm shifts. Paradigms are predominant theoretical frameworks or
scientific world views.
The unit has looked at the concepts and techniques of HCI, the history of paradigm shifts, the
history of basic interactions and the personalities behind the innovations of HCI.

6.0 Tutor Marked Assignment

1. What do you understand by the expression Human Computer Interaction?
2. Mention any 5 scientific methods of conducting research in human-computer interaction.
3. Distinguish between an interaction technique and an interaction style.
4. Explain what you understand as the paradigms of human Computer interaction
5. Explain any 5 innovations relating to the history of paradigm shifts

7.0 Further Reading/References

o Andrew Sears and Julie A. Jacko (Eds.). (2007). Handbook for Human Computer Interaction
(2nd Edition). CRC Press. ISBN 0-8058-5870-9
o Julie A. Jacko and Andrew Sears (Eds.). (200 3). Handbook for Human Computer Interaction.
Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum & Associates. ISBN 0-8058-4468-6
o Stuart K. Card, Thomas P. Moran, Allen Newell (198 3): The Psychology of Human—Computer
Interaction. Erlbaum, Hillsdale 198 3 ISBN 0-89859-24 3-7
o Brad A. Myers: A brief history of human—computer interaction technology. Interactions
5(2):44-54, 1998, ISSN 1072-5520 ACM Press. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2744 30.2744 36