Human Computer Interaction

Research & Design of how humans interact with computer technology.

Methods

• Double Diamond Process
• Affinity Diagrams: Organize/group ideas/insights from a brainstorm session into hierarchy

History

• Evolved 70s / early 80s
• Combination of
  • User interface design (UI)
  • User experience design (UX)
  • User centered design (UCD)
• WIMP — Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointers (evolved to GUI)
• Shift towards “Beyond the desktop”
• Second Wave HCI: Participatory Design
  • “understanding people as actors” and not as “idiots”, and focusing on the “process of design” rather than on the product (Bannon 1991)
• Third wave of HCI: (Bødker 2006)
  • multiplicity of interaction
  • broadening the use contexts of technologies and application types
  • explores notions of culture, experience, emotion and reflexivity
• Fourth wave of HCI: Entanglement (Frauenberger 2020)

Design Attitudes

• design-centric attitude: anticipated use, attach functional requirements to physical form
• communicative attitude:
  • alignment of anticipated and actual use.
  • artifacts are communicational devices
• user-centric attitude (UCD): rethink users as active performers; makers of use

Contextual Design

• Systematic approach for user-centered design (UCD)
• Developed in the 90s
• Principles:
  • Design must support and extend users “work practice”
  • People are experts
  • good design requires participation

1. Contextual inquiry
2. Work modelling
3. Consolidation
4. Personas built with contextual data
5. The Design Response: Visioning
6. Storyboards
7. User environment design
8. Mock-up and test with customers
9. Driving Product Development
10. Contextual Design And Agile Development

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References

Liam J Bannon. 1991. From Human Factors to Human Actors: The role of psychology and human-computer interaction studies in system design. In Design at Work: Cooperative Design of Computer Systems, J. Greenbaum and M. Kyng (eds.). Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum Associated, 25–44

Susanne Bødker. 2006. When second wave HCI meets third wave challenges. In Proceedings of the 4th Nordic conference on Humancomputer interaction changing roles (NordiCHI ’06), Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1–8. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/1182475.118247

Christopher Frauenberger. 2020. Entanglement HCI The Next Wave? In ACM Trans. Comput.-Hum. Interact. 27, 1 (February 2020), 1–27. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3364998