WHAT DO WE MEAN BY HCI,

USABILITY, AND USER

INTERFACES
Usability Engineering: Process,
Products, and Examples
Chapter 2

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WHAT DO WE MEAN BY
HUMAN–COMPUTER
INTERFACE?
 HCI
 Human-computer interaction is the discipline concerned
with the design, evaluation and implementation of
interactive computing systems for human use and with
the study of the major phenomena surrounding them.
 UI
 “User interface.”
 Usability
 The quality of an interface that measures if it is
appropriate for the user or the task for which the system
was built.

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WHAT WE ARE NOT...

 We are not interested in "user friendly." ”User friendly" is an

anthropomorphic term.
 Do you wish to be friends with your computer?
 “User-friendly” suggests a one-dimensional attribute. The
system is either user friendly or not!
 Clearly there is a range of usabilty values as user interfaces can be
more or less usable.

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FACTORS THAT INFLUENCE THE
SUCCESS OF A USER INTERFACE

 Type of user
 Type of task
 Hardware constraints
 Social and cultural limitations

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 WHO PARTICIPATES IN HCI
 The backgrounds of HCI professionals include:
 Computer science
 Psychology
 Anthropology
 Professional computer scientists often have no formal
training in these fields.
 Myers (1998) notes:
 “If students do not know about user interfaces, they will not
serve industry needs. It seems that only through computer
science does HCI research disseminate to products.”

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WHY AN INTEREST IN HCI NOW?

 Interest in interactive and user-oriented computing did not just

appear in the last ten years.
 Basis for today’s user interfaces were set in the 1950s, 1960s, and
even earlier.
 Focus on usability has evolved with computing technologies.

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FACTORS INFLUENCING INTEREST
IN USABILITY
 Changes in hardware environments
 Diversification of users
 Diversification of applications

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CHANGES IN HARDWARE
ENVIRONMENTS
 Hardware has become much more powerful.
 This has permitted the development of more sophisticated
user interfaces, such as graphical user interfaces.
 The hardware that the user interacts with directly
(peripherals) has become more diversified.
 This has also contributed to the development of different
user interfaces.
 The hardware has become more accessible to a
wider range of users.

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CHANGES IN USER
CHARACTERISTICS
 The proportion of professional computer scientists to
discretionary users has changed dramatically.
 Many more users are discretionary instead of professional computer
scientists today.
 Novice users have sophisticated expectations about the computer
systems that they use.

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CHANGES IN SOFTWARE
APPLICATIONS

 The software applications that the user interacts with directly have
become more and more diversified.

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PERSPECTIVE

 Building usable interfaces is difficult.

 Many myths about usability persist.
 Good user interfaces are just appealing graphics.
 Usability is an outcome of common sense.
 Guidelines, applied to user interface problems, will lead to usability.
 Usability problems can be solved with help/training/documentation.

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WHAT ARE THE BIG ISSUES?

 How do we improve user interfaces and the user interface

development process?
 What is the future of HCI?
 How can computer scientists ensure good usability in the
systems that they build?

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CONCLUSIONS

 Concerns for software usability evolved in the context of

computing technology and usage patterns.
 Building usable interfaces is not easy.
 Building usable interfaces is not just common sense.

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