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The Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction, 2nd Ed.

The Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction, 2nd Ed.

Free textbooks written by more than 100 leading designers, bestselling authors, and Ivy League professors. We have assembled our textbooks in a gigantic encyclopedia, whose 4,000+ pages cover the design of interactive products and services such as websites, household objects, smartphones, computer software, aircraft cockpits, and what have you. Name an item of design interest, and you'll probably find it discussed inside.

Table of Contents

Research Bibliography

Browse the world’s largest Wiki Bibliography on human-centered technology, comprising 138,000 authors in more than 127,000 publications.

Latest UX Design Articles

UX Daily is the world’s largest free online resource on UX Design, with new articles published every day.

Contributing Authors

We are honored to have these highly regarded professors and experts as contributing authors of our educational materials:

Don Norman
Don Norman Director of The Design Lab at the University of California

Don Norman is widely regarded as the creator of the term “UX design.” An expert in design, usability, and cognitive science, Norman strongly advocated for user-centered design, which now underpins almost all design fields. His ideas on aesthetics, affordances, and usability profoundly impact the way we design everything, from doors to software applications.

In 1993, he joined Apple as a User Experience Architect—the first-ever use of the phrase “user experience” in a job title. Norman’s books, The Design of Everyday Things and Emotional Design, are regarded as essential readings for any design student. He is currently director of The Design Lab at the University of California, San Diego, and is also co-founder of the Nielsen Norman Group.

Don Norman is the author of numerous books including "Emotional Design," and more recently, "Living with Complexity." He is co-founder of the Nielsen Norman group, a professor at KAIST (in Korea), an IDEO fellow, and a design theorist, studying the fundamentals of modern design.

Donald A. Norman has a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from MIT and a Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania. He also holds an honorary degree from the University of Padua, Italy. He has been a professor of Computer Science (at Northwestern University), Psychology, and Cognitive Science (at the University of California, San Diego).


William Hudson
William Hudson CEO, Syntagm LTD

William Hudson is a User Experience Strategist who consults, writes and teaches in the fields of user-centred design, user experience and usability. He has over 40 years experience in the development of interactive systems, initially with a background in software engineering. William was the product and user interface designer for the Emmy-award-winning "boujou"; now an indispensible tool in many film studios. He has specialized in interaction design and human-computer interaction since the late 1980's. William has written and taught courses which have been presented to hundreds of software and web developers, designers and managers in the UK, North America and Europe. He has developed and presented courses for the Nielsen Norman Group. William is the founder and principal consultant of Syntagm, a consultancy specializing in the design of interactive systems established in 1985.


Karen Holtzblatt
Karen Holtzblatt CEO at InContext Design

Recognized as a leader in the design community, Karen has pioneered transformative ideas and design approaches throughout her career. Karen is the inventor of Contextual Inquiry-the industry standard for gathering field data to understand how technology impacts the way people work. Contextual Inquiry and the design processes based on it provide a revolutionary approach for designing new products and systems based on a deep understanding of the context of use. Contextual Inquiry forms the base of Contextual Design, InContext's full customer-centered design process.

Karen co-founded InContext Enterprises in 1992 to use Contextual Design techniques to coach product teams and deliver customer-centered designs to businesses across multiple industries. The books, Contextual Design: Defining Customer-Centered Systems, and Rapid Contextual Design, are used by companies and universities all over the world. Karen is a member of the CHI Academy (awarded to significant contributors in the Computer-Human Interaction Association) and received the first Life Time Award for Practice at CHI2010 for her contributions to the field. Karen's extensive experience with teams and all types of work and life practice underlies the innovation and reliable quality consistently delivered by InContext's teams.

Karen also has more than 20 years of teaching experience, professionally and in university settings. She holds a doctorate in applied psychology from the University of Toronto.


Kerstin Dautenhahn
Kerstin Dautenhahn

Kerstin Dautenhahn is a German computer scientist specializing in social robotics and human-robot interaction. She is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Waterloo, where she holds the Canada 150 Research Chair in Intelligent Robotics and directs the Social and Intelligent Robotics Research Laboratory

The main areas of her research are Human-Robot Interaction, Social Robotics, Socially Intelligent Agents and Artificial Life. She is a former member of the Department of Biological Cybernetics at the University of Bielefeld, Germany, 1990-1993, and AI-Lab at GMD, Sankt Augustin, Germany, 1993-1996, and VUB Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Brussels, Belgium, until the end of 1996. From January 1997 to April 2000 Lecturer, Department of Cybernetics at University of Reading, United Kingdom.

In April 2000 she joined the Department of Computer Science (now School of Computer Science) at the University of Hertfordshire as Principal Lecturer. Later she got promoted to Reader and then Research Professor. She took her present position as Canada 150 Research Chair at the University of Waterloo in 2018.

She is the founding editor and co-editor-in-chief of the journal Interaction Studies: Social Behaviour and Communication in Biological and Artificial Systems. She is also the editor of multiple edited volumes including Human Cognition and Social Agent Technology (1999), Socially Intelligent Agents: Creating Relationships with Computers and Robots (with Alan H. Bond, Lola Cañamero, and Bruce Edmonds, 2002), Imitation in Animals and Artifacts (with Chrystopher L. Nehaniv, 2002), and New Frontiers in Human-Robot Interaction (with Joe Saunders, 2011).


Frank Spillers
Frank Spillers MS

Frank Spillers is a web and software usability expert, a distinguished speaker, author, and internationally respected Senior Usability practitioner. He is an expert in improving the design and usability of large-scale websites, web applications, desktop, and mobile apps. He is the founder of the usability consultancy firm Experience Dynamics. With an MSc in Cognitive Science and eleven years of experience in UX design, Spillers has worked with clients such as Hewlett-Packard, Intel, and Microsoft. He is an experienced practitioner of user-centered and emotional design and has developed a new research technique called “cognitive archeology,” which aids experts when researching emotional product design.

Before founding Experience Dynamics in 2001, Frank managed usability consulting for WebCriteria (now Coremetrics) and worked with students of Dr. Donald Norman (the grandfather of User-Centered Design) at Intuitive Design, a San Diego-based User-Centered Design consultancy. His current clients include Microsoft, Intel, IBM, Logitech, GE, Nike, Hewlett-Packard, KeyBank, Four Seasons, Chase, Target.com, and Whitepages.com. He has trained thousands of teams and individuals in usability and User-Centered Design techniques in private as well as public settings.

Frank received his Master's in Cognitive Science (MS) from Birmingham University, the UK in the user experience of collaborative (social) virtual (3D) environments.


Kristina Höök
Kristina Höök Professor

Kristina Hook is a professor in Interaction Design at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Sweden. She started and now works in the Mobile Life center. She also upholds a part-time position at SICS (Swedish Institute of Computer Science).

Her research interests include affective interaction, somaesthetic design, the internet of things, and anything that makes life with technology more meaningful, enjoyable, creative, and aesthetically appealing.


We only invite contributions from globally recognized authorities within their respective design fields.

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