Human Computer Interaction (HCI)

Human-computer interaction (HCI) is an area of research and practice that emerged in the early 1980s, initially as a specialty area in computer science. HCI has expanded rapidly and steadily for three decades, attracting professionals from many other disciplines and incorporating diverse concepts and approaches. To a considerable extent, HCI now aggregates a collection of semi-distinct fields of research and practice in human-centered informatics. However, the continuing synthesis of disparate conceptions and approaches to science and practice in HCI has produced a dramatic example of how different epistemologies and paradigms can be reconciled and integrated.

Where HCI came from

Until the late 1970s, the only humans who interacted with computers were information technology professionals and dedicated hobbyists. This changed disruptively with the emergence of personal computing around 1980. Personal computing, including both personal software (productivity applications, such as text editors and spreadsheets, and interactive computer games) and personal computer platforms (operating systems, programming languages, and hardware), made everyone in the developed world a potential computer user, and vividly highlighted the deficiencies of computers with respect to usability for those who wanted to use computers as tools.

The challenge of personal computing became manifest at an opportune time. The broad project of cognitive science, which incorporated cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence, linguistics, cognitive anthropology, and the philosophy of mind, had formed at the end of the 1970s. Part of the programme of cognitive science was to articulate systematic and scientifically-informed applications to be known as "cognitive engineering". Thus, at just the point when personal computing presented the practical need for HCI, cognitive science presented people, concepts, skills, and a vision for addressing such needs. HCI was one of the first examples of cognitive engineering.

Other historically fortuitous developments contributed to establishment of HCI. Software engineering, mired in unmanageable software complexity in the 1970s, was starting to focus on nonfunctional requirements, including usability and maintainability, and on non-linear software development processes that relied heavily on testing. Computer graphics and information retrieval had emerged in the 1970s, and rapidly came to recognize that interactive systems were the key to progressing beyond early achievements. All these threads of development in computer science pointed to the same conclusion: The way forward for computing entailed understanding and better empowering users.

Finally human factors engineering, which had developed many techniques for empirical analysis of human-system interactions in so-called control domains such as aviation and manufacturing, came to see HCI as a valuable and challenging domain in which human operators regularly exerted greater problem-solving discretion. These forces of need and opportunity converged around 1980, focusing a huge burst of human energy, and creating a highly visible interdisciplinary project.

From cabal to community

The original and abiding technical focus of HCI is on the concept of usability. This concept was originally articulated naively in the slogan "easy to learn, easy to use". The blunt simplicity of this conceptualization gave HCI an edgy and prominent identity in computing. It served to hold the field together, and to help it influence computer science and technology development more broadly and effectively. However, inside HCI the concept of usability has been reconstructed continually, and has become increasingly rich and intriguingly problematic. Usability now often subsumes qualities like fun, well-being, collective efficacy, aesthetic tension, enhanced creativity, support for human development, and many others. A more dynamic view of usability is that of a programmatic objective that should continue to develop as our ability to reach further toward it improves.

Although the original academic home for HCI was computer science, and its original focus was on personal productivity applications, mainly text editing and spreadsheets, the field has constantly diversified and outgrown all boundaries. It quickly expanded to encompass visualization, information systems, collaborative systems, the system development process, and many areas of design. HCI is taught now in many departments/faculties that address information technology, including psychology, design, communication studies, cognitive science, information science, science and technology studies, geographical sciences, management information systems, and industrial, manufacturing, and systems engineering. HCI research and practice draws upon and integrates all of these perspectives.

A result of this growth is that HCI is now less singularly focused with respect to core concepts and methods, problem areas and assumptions about infrastructures, applications, and types of users. Indeed, it no longer makes sense to regard HCI as a specialty of computer science; HCI has grown to be broader, larger and much more diverse than computer science. It expanded from individual and generic user behavior to include social and organizational computing, creativity, and accessibility for the elderly, the cognitively impaired, and for all people. It expanded from desktop office applications to include games, e-learning, e-commerce, military systems, and process control. It expanded from early graphical user interfaces to include myriad interaction techniques and devices, multi-modal interactions, and host of emerging ubiquitous, handheld and context-aware interactions.

There is no unified concept of an HCI professional. In the 1980s, people often contrasts the cognitive science side of HCI with the software tools and user interface side of HCI. The HCI landscape is far more differentiated and complex now. HCI academic programs train many different types of professionals now: user experience designers, interaction designers, user interface designers, application designers, usability engineers, user interface developers, application developers, technical communicators/online information designers, and more. And indeed, many of the sub-communities of HCI are themselves quite diverse. For example, ubiquitous computing (aka ubicomp) is subarea of HCI, but it is also a superordinate area integrating several mutually diverse subareas (e.g., mobile computing, geo-spatial information systems, in-vehicle systems, community informatics, distributed systems, handhelds, wearable devices, ambient intelligence, sensor networks, and specialized views of usability evaluation, programming tools and techniques, application infrastructures, etc.). The relationship between ubiquitous computing and HCI is becoming paradigmatic: HCI is the name for a community of communities.

In the early 1980s, HCI was a small and focused specialty area. It was a cabal trying to establish what was then a heretical view of computing. Today, largely due to the success of that endeavor, HCI is a vast and multifaceted community, loosely bound by the evolving concept of usability, and the integrating commitment to value human concerns as the primary consideration in creating interactive systems.

Implications of HCI for science, practice, and epistemology

One of the most significant achievements of HCI is its evolving model of the integration of science and practice. Initially this model was articulated as a reciprocal relation between cognitive science and cognitive engineering. Later, it ambitiously incorporated a diverse science foundation, notably Activity Theory, distributed cognition, and ethnomethodology, and a culturally embedded conception of human activity, including the activities of design and technology development. Currently, the model is incorporating design practices and research across a broad spectrum. In these developments, HCI provides a blueprint for a mutual relation between science and practice that is unprecedented.

Early HCI sought to develop synergies between cognitive science and cognitive engineering. During the 1980s a rich reciprocal relationship developed. In areas like user modeling, HCI directly applied key cognitive science theories to the design of command languages and information visualizations. In other cases, HCI provided guidance to cognitive science through embodied concepts like direct manipulation and user interface metaphor. Mutual reciprocity between underlying science and application is rare, but not unprecedented (the discovery of the transistor effect in physics emerged from applied research). For HCI, this starting point was an intellectually sophisticated and ambitious foundation for more radical possibilities.

HCI research and application provided a strong force for theoretical integration within cognitive science. The very first HCI theories were far more ambitious integrations than had been attempted in the basic science. For example, the model human processor included simple aspects of perception, attention, short-term memory operations, planning, and motor behavior in a single model. Ironically, while such models astounded cognitive science researchers, they were criticized within HCI as too limited with respect to understanding and creating applications. This self-criticism promoted increasingly comprehensive modeling that has jointly driven the basic science and its applications. But more importantly, these early successes, and their deconstruction, further fueled paradigmatic aspirations in HCI.

In the latter 1980s and early 1990s, HCI assimilated ideas from Activity Theory, distributed cognition, and ethnomethodology. This comprised a fundamental epistemological realignment. For example, the representational theory of mind, a cornerstone of cognitive science, is no longer axiomatic for HCI science. Information processing psychology and laboratory user studies, once the kernel of HCI research, became important, but niche areas. The most canonical theory-base in HCI now is socio-cultural, Activity Theory. Field studies became typical, and eventually dominant as an empirical paradigm. Collaborative interactions, that is, groups of people working together through and around computer systems (in contrast to the early 1980s user-at-PC situation) have become the default unit of analysis. It is remarkable that such fundamental realignments were so easily assimilated by the HCI community.

Although HCI was always talked about as a design science or as pursuing guidance for designers, this was construed at first as a boundary, with HCI and design as separate contributing areas. Throughout the 1990s, however, HCI directly assimilated, and eventually itself spawned, a series of design communities. At first, this was a merely ecumenical acceptance of methods and techniques laying those of beyond those of science and engineering. But this outreach impulse coincided with substantial advances in user interface technologies that shifted much of the potential proprietary value of user interfaces into graphical design. Somewhat ironically, designers were welcomed into the HCI community just in time to help remake it as a design discipline. A large part of this transformation was the creation of design disciplines that did not exist before. For example, user experience design and interaction design were not imported into HCI, but rather were among the first exports from HCI to the design world. Design is currently the facet of HCI in most rapid flux. It seems likely that more new design proto-disciplines will emerge from HCI during the next decade.

Conceptions of how underlying science informs and is informed by the worlds of practice and activity have evolved continually in HCI since its inception. In each of the three eras of HCI, as briefly sketched above, paradigm-changing scientific and epistemological revisions were deliberately embraced by a field that was, by any measure, succeeding intellectually and practically. The result has been an increasingly fragmented and complex field that has continued to succeed even more. This example contradicts the Kuhnian view of how intellectual projects develop through paradigms that are eventually overthrown. The continuing success of the HCI community in moving its meta-project forward thus has profound implications, not only for human-centered informatics, but for epistemology.

Pointers: How to learn more

History

Unfortunately, the best primary information about the founding of HCI - the proceedings of the 1982 US Bureau of Standards Conference in Gaithersburg, Maryland, and the 1984 IFIP INTERACT Conference in London - are not available in digital form. Brad Myers published an interesting history (Myers 1998). The leading textbooks include some discussion of history (see below).

The top international conference for HCI is the ACM CHI Conference. However, as the leading conference, CHI tends to be conservative. There are many other general HCI conferences of roughly equivalent quality that represent diverse aspects of HCI and that sometimes are more innovative than CHI: the NordiCHI conference, the British Computing society's HCI Conference. There also are a host of excellent HCI specialty conferences, addressing particular subareas: UIST, CSCW, ECSCW, GROUP, DIS, C&T, Creativity & Cognition.

The leading general journal for HCI is the ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction. However, as is the case with the CHI Conference, this journal is conservative by design. There are many other journals of roughly equivalent quality: Human-Computer Interaction (emphasizes design research), Interacting With Computers, International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, Journal of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work. Recently, Association for Information Systems has initiated Transactions on HCI.

Textbooks

The number of important monographs is just too large to list, so I have concentrated in the list below on a few significant textbooks. Readers should also check the HCI Bibliography, the HCC Education Digital Library, the ACM Digital Library, and the Synthesis Series of lectures on human-centered informatics.

• Dix, Alan J., Finlay, Janet E., Abowd, Gregory D. and Beale, Russell (2003): Human-Computer Interaction (3rd Edition). Prentice Hall
   View info on Amazon.com or .co.uk  
  
• Shneiderman, Ben and Plaisant, Catherine (2005): Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction (4th ed.). Addison-Wesley
  

These texts have both been through several editions. Both are highly refined and comprehensive.

• Sharp, Helen, Rogers, Yvonne and Preece, Jennifer J. (2007): Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction. John Wiley and Sons
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Sharp et al. (2007) emphasize HCI as interaction design.

• Rosson, Mary Beth and Carroll, John M. (2001): Usability Engineering: Scenario-Based Development of Human Computer Interaction. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers
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Rosson and Carroll (2003) emphasize a software engineering view of HCI. The text uses a set of case studies to convey an engineering process view of usability.

• Carroll, John M. (ed.) (2003): HCI Models, Theories, and Frameworks: Toward a multidisciplinary science. San Francisco, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers
   View info on Amazon.com or .co.uk  
  

Carroll (2003) presents various scientific conceptions of HCI. An even broader collection of theory-based tutorials is being developed in the Synthesis Series on Human-Centered Informatics.

My personal perspectives on the emergence and development of HCI are elaborated in several other articles:

• Carroll, John M. (1997): Human-Computer Interaction: Psychology as a Science of Design. In International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 46 (4) pp. 501-522
  “Human-computer interaction (HCI) is the area of intersection between psychology and the social sciences, on the one hand, and computer science and technology, on the other. HCI researchers analyse and design-specific user-interface technologies (e.g. three-dimensional pointing devices, interactive video). They study and improve the processes of technology development (e.g. usability evaluation, design rationale). They develop and evaluate new applications of technology (e.g. computer conferencing, software design environments). Through the past two decades, HCI has progressively integrated its scientific concerns with the engineering goal of improving the usability of computer systems and applications, thus establishing a body of technical knowledge and methodology. HCI continues to provide a challenging test domain for applying and developing psychology and social science in the context of technology development and use.”

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• Carroll, John M. (2004): Beyond fun. In Interactions, 11 (5) pp. 38-40
• Carroll, John M. (2002): MacMillan Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science. In: "MacMillan Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science". Macmillan-Nature Publishing Group
  

Relevant Conference Series

ACM SIGCHI CHI - Human Factors in Computing Systems

ECSCW - European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperate Work

CSCW - Conference On Computer-Supported Cooperative Work

UIST - Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology

NordiCHI - Nordic conference on human-computer interaction

BCSHCI People and Computers

ACM SIGGROUP Conference on Supporting Group Work

DIS - Designing Interactive Systems

Creativity and Cognition

What do YOU think?

Give us your opinion! Do you have any comments/additions
that you would like other visitors to see?

Josh says: Apr 11th, 2009

#1

Very insightful article. I feel more connected to the history of UX design and HCI now that I understand their history. Now I can fondly recall when I was at the wee age of 9, waking up in the silent hours of the night to boot my Apple IIE and peer into it's green screen hoping to figure out what this thing did and could do for me.



The only thing that differentiated me and my folks (oddly the messangers of this technology) was that I was not afraid of breaking the machine and therefore I had more potential to discover and learn.

Elizabeth Bacon says: Apr 15th, 2009

#2

I was particularly struck by this sentence: "Today, largely due to the success of that endeavor, HCI is a vast and multifaceted community, loosely bound by the evolving concept of usability, and the integrating commitment to value human concerns as the primary consideration in creating interactive systems."



This statement resonated with me, as it echoes the Interaction Design Association (IxDA) manifesto (http://www.ixda.org/about.php). So in addition to the other organizations cited in this article, I'd like to respectfully add IxDA to the list of groups supporting advancement in HCI, from the human-experience side. We also have an annual Interaction conference, now going into its third year for 2010.

Brandon says: Apr 20th, 2009

#3

Interesting to read about the evolution of HCI. A couple items struck me. First I had never considered HCI a key component in moving from linear to non-linear programming. Second given all the advances in computing technology and its near ubiquitous use good interface design is at a premium. In the early days of computing when computers really were for "geeks" command languages, green screens, and menu-driven software was sufficient. Now that computing technology is truly for the masses and especially now that computing technology is not limited to the traditional personal computer it is clear that new forms of human-computer interfaces must be developed. Thus HCI research will continue to have an important role in technical innovation.

Brandon says: Apr 20th, 2009

#4

Josh -



My first PC was also an Apple IIE. It was the machine that inspired me to become a programmer. My Dad bought a book entitled something along the lines of "Kids and Apple Basic". I spent hours exploring the examples from that book and customizing those examples into my applications.



Looking back the Apple IIE was a pretty klunky machine. No hard drive. Applications had to be loaded from disk every time. We did have a color monitor. If computers still looked and worked like the Apple I doubt they would be widely used today. HCI concepts have most certainly moved technology in a positive direction.

Oskars says: May 18th, 2009

#5

Looking at the stages of development in HCI and interaction design, I wonder whether the next step would not be describing and evaluating the features of "mental model space." It is not unusual to speak of the mental models that users construct of the artifacts that they use. In a different vein, Benjamin Kuipers has coined the phrase semantic spatial hierarchy to describe what some psychologists call the "cognitive map". Do you think it would make sense to say that users of a software system find themselves within a "mental model space"?



If so, that brings up the question: Has experimental psychology advanced to the point that we can begin to describe the mental model space of a particualr software systems. If so, then we should also be able to critique that space in terms of well-known design principles such as symmetry, proportion, balance, harmony, unity, etc.



To take an example from the physical world, the driver of a car inhabits a mental model space partially determined by the real world surrounding the car and partially determined by the operative features of the car itself. So we can critique the design of a car with respect to the design principle of symmetry. A steering wheel obeys that principle because turning the wheel in one direction has the opposite effect of turning it in the opposite direction. By contrast, the gas pedal and brake, being in close proximity and also requiring very similar actions with one and the same foot, in a moment of panic can create confusion. So, from time to time, we hear of an accident resulting when the driver tromps on the gas pedal instead of slamming on the brakes. This violates the design principle of symmetry.

Frank Vetere says: Jul 9th, 2009

#6

Another general HCI conference worth mentioning is OZCHI (http://www.ozchi.org/ and http://www.interaction-design.org/references/conferences/series/ozchi.html). This conference is the Australian based and comparable to NordiCHI and BSC-HCI

Bclover says: Jul 22nd, 2009

#7

What about the influence of instructional systems design? ISD and IxD seem very related. While ISD deals with creating instruction...the process of identifying the users' goals and needs and very similar. It seems to me that the instructional design process is a precursor to IxD. IxD is practically the same thing...just simpler because there's no need to focus on creating content that actually teaches and trains people. Thoughts? Comments?

Reza says: Aug 31st, 2009

#8

Thank you for helpful information, I think some points are missing such as ubicomp conference, Behavior and Information technology journal and etc.

Jos Te Braake says: Jan 12th, 2010

#9

In the first paragraph you say "Personal computing, ... made everyone in the developed world a potential computer user". It is suggested you delete the word "developed" because people in the "less developed world" were also keenly getting into personal computing. I was living in Zimbabwe in the early 1980s and eagerly got stuck into Multimate and Lotus 1-2-3 as soon as these systems were available. Commercial banks were amongst the first organizations to introduce personal computers in the work place and some people purchased their own computers to use at home.

 

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#10

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