Paradigms

Human Machine Interaction

-Dix, Finlay, Abowd, Beatle-

(Lecture Notes)

Ngo Thi Duyen

(duyennt@vnu.edu.vn)
Faculty of Information Technology
Vietnam National University, Hanoi
 Overview
 Introduction
 Paradigms for interaction
 Time sharing
 Video display units
 Programming toolkits
 Personal computing
 Windows system & the WIMP interface
 The metaphor
 Direct manipulation
 Language vs. action
 Hypertext
 Multi-modality
 Computer-supported cooperative work
 www
 Agent-based interfaces
 Ubiquitous computing

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 Why study paradigms
 Allow users to achieve particular goals in some application domain
 Is a primary objective of an interactive system

 Two open questions posed to the designer of an interactive system

 How can an interactive system be developed to ensure its usability?
 How can the usability of an interactive system be demonstrated and measured?

 Approach
 By means of examples, in which the successful interactive systems are
commonly believed to enhance usability
  serve as paradigms for the development of future products

 History of interactive system design

 Provides paradigms for usable designs

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 What are paradigms

 Predominant theoretical frameworks or scientific world

views

 Understanding HCI history is largely about

understanding a series of paradigm shifts
 Not all listed here are necessarily “paradigm” shifts but are at
least candidates
 History will judge which are true shifts

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 Paradigms of interaction

 New computing technologies arrive, creating new

perception of the human-computer relationship

 We can trace some of these shifts in the history of

interactive technologies

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 Time sharing
 1940s and 1950s: significant advances in computing
consisted of new hardware technologies
 Mechanical relay (Rơ le cơ khí) replaced by vacuum
electron tubes transistor  integrated chips
Batch
 Humans was restricted to batch sessions, in which processing
complete jobs were submitted to an operator who run
them individually on the computer

 1960s: explosion of growth in computing power

 The concept of time-sharing Personal
 A single computer can support multiple users computing

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 Video display units
 Mid-1950s researchers were experimenting with the possibility of
presenting & manipulating information from a computer in the form of
images on a VDU (video display unit)

 More suitable medium for presenting vast amount of information than

paper

 1962: Sutherland’s sketchpad program

 Allow a computer operator to use the computer to create rapidly
sophisticated visual models on a display screen
 Visual patterns can be stored in memory and manipulated like other data

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 Video display units (cont’d)

 Two important ideas demonstrated by Sketchpad

 Computers used for more than just data processing

 For visualizing & manipulating different representation of
the same information
 Abstractions didn’t have to be limited to representation in
terms of bit sequence in memory, But truly visual  enhance
human interaction

 One person’s contribution could change the history of computing

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 Programming toolkits
 Since early 1950s, ambition of Engelbart at Stanford Research Institute
 Use computer technology as a means of complementing human problem-solving
activity

 Many of the ideas of Engelbart’s team (e.g., word processing & mouse)
 Only attained mass commercial success decades after their invention

 Humans often attack complex intellectual problems

 like a carpenter who produce beautifully complex pieces of woodwork with a good
set of tools
  the right programming toolkit provides building blocks to producing complex
interactive systems

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 Personal computing
 The decade of the 1970s saw the emergence of computing power
 Papert’s LOGO graphic programming language for children
 His valuable maxim for interactive system: no matter how powerful a system
may be, it will be more powerful IF it is easier to use

 In the early of 1970s, view of Kay at Xerox PARK

 The future of computing was embodied in small, powerful machines
which were dedicated to single users

 Kay’s vision in the mid-1970s of the ultimate handheld personal

computer, called Dynabook
 Outstrips even the technology we have available today

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 Window systems and the WIMP interface

 Humans are able to think more than one thing at a time

 In accomplishing some piece of work , they frequently interrupt their

current train of thought to pursue some other related piece of work

 Windows used for dialogue partitioning, to “change the topic”

 Interaction based on windows, icons, menus, pointers – WIMP interface

 Is now commonplace
 These interaction devices first appeared in the market in April 1981,
 when the 8010 Star Information System was introduced by Xerox
Corporation

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 The metaphor
 Are used quite successfully to teach new concepts in terms of ones which
are already understood
 E.g., File management on an office desktop is linked to the filing task in the
typical office environment makes the actual computerized tasks easier to
understand
 Word processing as typing
 Financial analysis on spreadsheets

 Problems
 Some task don’t fit into a given metaphor. If the designers try to make metaphor
stick, the resulting system can be more confusing
 E.g., ejecting CD or printing a document
 Cultural bias

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 Direct manipulation
 Rapid feedback is one feature of the interaction technique known as direct
manipulation

 1982- Scheiderman coins this phrase to describe the appeal of graphically-based

interaction

 Feature of direct manipulation interface

 Visibility of the objects of interest
 Incremental action at the interface with rapid feedback on all actions
 Reversibility of all actions, so that users are encouraged to explore without severe
penalties
 Syntactic correctness of all actions so that every user action is a legal operation
 Replacement of complex command language with action to manipulate directly the visible
objects

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 Direct manipulation (cont’d)
 Apple Macintosh personal computer introduced in 1984
 First commercial success that demonstrated the usability of DM interfaces

 E.g., File management described by files and directories

 & Described by documents & folders in the office environment

 The DM interface for the desktop metaphor requires that documents & folders are
made visible to the user as icons which represent the underlying files & directories
 An operation such as moving a file from one directory to another carried out by
an action “picked up & dragged” on the visible document

 Visualization by DM is somewhat related to WYSIWYG

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 Language vs. action
 Whereas it’s true that DM interfaces called action paradigm
 makes some tasks easier to perform correctly (simple tasks only)
 But some complicated tasks are rather tedious to perform
 Require repetitive execution of the same procedure with only minor
modification
 Actions performed at the interface replace any need to understand their meanings
at deeper system levels

 Language paradigm
 User gives interface Instructions, the interface is responsible for seeing how
instructions are performed
 Possibility of describing a generic procedure once
 E.g., a looping construct which will perform a routine manipulation on all files in a
directory
 Then leaving it to be executed without further user intervention

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 Hypertext
 Traditional paper
 To read from beginning to end in a linear fashion

 1945, Vannevar Bush, a scientific administrator in the US war effort

 Realize the increasingly difficulty in keeping in touch with the growing
body of scientific knowledge in the literature
 Described an apparatus: the memex
 To store & retrieve connected pieces of knowledge by mimicking our ability
to create random associative links

 Ted Nelson attempted to create a machine language equivalent of the

Memex on early 1960s computer hardware
 But unsuccessful !

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 Hypertext (cont’d)
 Within text
 User is urged to digress into a richer topic a random & associated
browsing task
 Memex provides the non-linear browsing structure in the actual
documentation

 Mid – 1960s Nelson coined hypertext as non-linear browsing

structure
 Hypermedia/ Multimedia for non-linear storage of all forms of electronic
media

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 Multimodality
 Input & output devices can be considered as communication
channels for interactive systems
 Correspond to Human Communication Channels

 A multi-modal interactive system

 Is a system that relies on the use of multiple human communication
channels
 E,g., humans use visual & haptic channels at the same time

 Each different channel for the user

 Is referred to as modality of interaction

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 Computer-supported cooperative work-CSCW

 In the 1960s, the establishment of the first computer

network
 Allow communication between separate machines
 Collaboration between individuals via computer was emerged,
called CSCW

 E.g., email
 Individuals at physically separate locations can communicate via
electronic message
 Wok in a similar way to conventional postal systems

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 The world wide web
 The most significant recent development in interactive computing
 Web: offer an easy-to-use graphical interface

 www
 Was conceived in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee, working at CERN, European
Particle Physics Lab. at Geneva
 As a mean to enable the widespread distribution of scientific data generated at
CERN & to share information between scientists worldwide

 1991- the first text-based web browser was released

 Early 1993- several graphical web browsers

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 The world wide web (cont’d)
 Internet has been around since 1969, but it didn’t become a major
paradigm for interaction
 Until the advent of well-designed graphic interfaces (browsers) for the
web
  allow accessing of multimedia information using only a mouse to point
and lick

 Web didn’t provide any technological breakthrough

 All required functionality previously existed
 E.g., transmission protocols, distributed file system, hypertext, etc
 The impact has been due to the ease of use of both the browser & HTML

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 Agent-based interfaces
 In human world, agents are people who work on someone’s behalf
 E.g., Estate agents, Travel agents

 Software agents likewise act on behalf of users within electronic world

 Email agents: filter emails for you
 Web crawler: search the www for documents you might find interesting

 Some agents simply do what they are told using if-then rules
 IF sender is bank manager, THEN urgency is high
 need develop a suitable language between human & agent to satisfy such a
communication!

 Other agents use AI techniques

 To learn based on user’ actions

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 Summary
 Discussed paradigms that promote the usability of interactive
systems

 The problem with these paradigms

 They are rarely well defined
 not always clear how they support a user in accomplishing some tasks
 repeated use of some paradigm sometimes will not result in the
design of a more usable model

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