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• SOEN 6751 is an introductory course covering the history of HCI, and good and bad design principles.

Rocker Switch Gearshift

• Fiat Chrysler used this type of gearshift in their vehicles.
• The design led to 306 incidents, 117 crashes, and 41 injuries.
• The issue was mainly attributed to "driver error".
• The corrective action was additional warnings and emphasis on reading the manuals.
• Chrysler recalled over 1,000,000 cars.

Mental Model

• It is a person's internal representation of external reality.
• It is based on learning and experience.

Human Computer Interaction

• It involves a system model, which shows how something works, and an interaction model, which illustrates how to use something.
• Chrysler is considered a good system model, but a bad interaction model.

How Big Is HCI?

• The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems is a leading international conference in the field.
• Reference links are provided to the CHI 2019 conference.

History of HCI

• 1945: Vannevar Bush publishes "As We May Think" in The Atlantic Monthly.
• 1962: Ivan Sutherland develops Sketchpad.
• 1963: Douglas Engelbart invents the computer mouse.
• 1981: Xerox Star is launched.
• 1982: ACM SIGCHI is formed.
• 1983: Card, Moran, and Newell publish The Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction.
• 1984: Apple Macintosh is launched.
• 2022: 40th Anniversary of "CHI", the SIGCHI annual conference

Vannevar Bush's "As We May Think" (1945)

• Published in The Atlantic Monthly's July 1945 issue.
• Vannevar Bush was the U.S. government's Director of the Office of Scientific Research and advisor to President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
• Bush led approximately 6,000 American scientists in applying science to warfare.
• Bush proposed a device called memex for navigating the knowledge maze, which is like hyperlinks and bookmarks.
• Features of memex included associative indexing.
• Bush's inspiration came from the contemporary telephone exchange, described as a "spider web of metal, sealed in a thin glass container".

Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad (1962)

• Developed in response to the absence of usability in computers available in 1963, enabling a move away from written communication with computers.
• Commands were not typed in Sketchpad.
• Objects were directly drawn, resized, grabbed, moved, extended, and deleted using a light pen.
• The use of a pointing device for input made Sketchpad the first direct manipulation interface.
• Ben Shneiderman identified key aspects in 1983: visibility of objects, incremental action, rapid feedback, reversibility, exploration, syntactic correctness of all actions, replacing language with action.

Invention of the Mouse (1963)

• Douglas Engelbart invented the mouse.
• The mouse fundamentally changed human-computer interaction.
• It allowed users to manipulate an on-screen cursor instead of typing commands.
• Commands were issued by positioning the cursor and pressing a button on the mouse.
• The device contained two potentiometers positioned at right angles to each other.
• Large metal wheels were attached to the potentiometer shafts and protruded slightly from the base.
• The wheels rotated as it was maneuvered on a surface.

First User Study

• English, Engelbart & Berman conducted an experiment in 1967.
• The controlled experiment compared several input devices and x-y position control of an on-screen cursor.
• Devices included a mouse, joystick, light pen, knee-controlled lever, and a Grafacon.
• 13 participants were in the study, with (8 experienced, 3 inexperienced).
• A character target with surrounding distractor targets appeared on the display.
• Participants moved their hand to the input device, manipulated the device to move the cursor to the target, and then made a selection.

Xerox Star (1981)

• Introduced at the National Computer Conference in Chicago in May 1981, it was the first commercially released computer system with a GUI and mouse.
• It had windows, icons, menus, and a pointing device (WIMP).
• It supported direct manipulation and what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) interaction.
• One novel feature was the desktop metaphor.
• The desktop metaphor utilizes concepts and knowledge from the office desktop to the system's display, providing a jump-start for users.
• The display featured pictorial representations (icons) for documents, folders, trays, and accessories.
• With a GUI and point-select interaction, the Star interface was the archetype of direct manipulation.
• Previous command-line interfaces had a single channel of input, requiring users to memorize and type commands.
• Direct manipulation systems, like the Star, have multiple input channels, each with a direct correspondence to a task.
• Interaction with the channel is adjusted to the properties of the task with either continuous or discrete properties.
• Each control has a dedicated location on the display and is engaged using a direct point-select operation.
• The Star was not a success due to the fact that it was a networked workstation connected to a server, which was expensive: $16,000 for the workstation alone, during a time where personal computing was becoming common.
• VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet application that sold over 700,000 copies, became known as the first killer app, was not available, and it could only run applications developed by Xerox.

Birth of HCI

• The first ACM SIGCHI Conference was in 1983.
• The formation of the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI) was publicly announced in 1982 at the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Gaithersburg, Maryland.
• The Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction (1983) provided a comprehensive overview of core knowledge in basic psychology.
• It explains connections between low-level human processes and interactions humans have with computers.
• It provided a framework for this the model human processor (MHP).
• Synergy emerged between psychology and computer science with the notion that human behavior can be understood and even modelled as information processing activity.
• Launch of the Apple Macintosh in 1984, was sleek and sported the latest input device, a computer mouse.
• The OS and applications software promoted the graphical user interface (GUI) with direct manipulation and point-select interaction.
• The interface was simple and intuitive.
• Simplicity came with the one-button mouse.

Growth of HCI

• GUIs entered the mainstream with the advent of a much broader community of users and researchers being exposed to this new genre of interaction.
• Microsoft was a latecomer in graphical user interfaces.
• Windows 3.1 (1992) Windows was considered a reasonable alternative to the Macintosh OS.
• With HCI now in Universities and companies, companies soon realized that good user interface design is good business.

User Interface Design

• The process of making interfaces in software or computerized devices includes a strong focus on looks or style.
• The process intends to create designs that users will find easy to use and pleasurable.
• User interface design typically refers to graphical user interfaces but also includes others, such as voice-controlled or gesture-controlled ones.
• System users often judge a system by its interface rather than its functionality.
• A poorly designed interface can trigger catastrophic errors for the user.
• Poor user interface design is the reason why so many software systems are never used.

Bad Designs

• Included are examples of teapots that would impossible to use (Dan Norman).
• Elevator controls and labels on the bottom row all looked the same, so it can be easy to push a label by mistake instead of a control button.
• It makes the user question what to do.

Ten Principles of Good Design

• Good design is innovative, makes a product useful, and is aesthetic.
• Good design makes a product understandable, is unobtrusive, and is honest.
• Good design is long-lasting, and thorough down to the last detail.
• Good design is environmentally-friendly and is as little design as possible.

Good & Bad Designs

• Good Design example included an answering machine.
• Bad Design example included a confusing parking sign.
• Good and bad design example of remote controls, how convoluted it is.
• A keyboard design example, how the current design of QWERTY limits productivity.