This is a summary of Scott Mackenzie's book named Human-Computer Interaction: an Empirical Research Perspective (ISBN: ). I obtained a grade of 8.8 for the final exam after studying this summary.
HCI– SUMMARY
Chapter 1: Historical Context
- Computers came in 1940s; interaction (HCI) came in 1980s
- Between 1940s and 1980s only humans interacting with computers were the humans
who played a part in creating them (i.e., engineers, scientists etc.)
1.1 Introduction
- HCI owes a lot to older disciplines:
o Human factors / ergonomics is concerned with human capabilities,
limitations, performance, and with the design of systems that are efficient,
safe, comfortable, and enjoyable for the human user.
1.2 Vannevar Bush’s “as we may think” (1945)
- Vannevar Bush wrote the prophetic essay “As We May Think” published in the
Atlantic Monthly in July
- was the US government’s Director of the Office of Scientific Research and a scientific
advisor to President Franklin D. Roosevelt
- proposed navigating the knowledge maze with a device called memex. Feature of
memex is associative indexing (= points of interest can be connected and joined so
that selecting one item immediately and automatically selects another)
1.3 Ivan Sutherland’s Sketchpad (1962)
- Ivan Sutherland developed Sketchpad in the early 1960s as part of his PhD research
in electrical engineering at MIT
- Sketchpad was a graphics system that supported the
manipulation of geometric shapes and lines on a display
using a light pen.
- With Sketchpad objects were drawn, resized, grabbed,
and moved, extended, deleted–directly, using the light
pen
- Sketchpad is the first direct manipulation interface
- Ben Shneiderman’s 8 golden rules
1. Strive for consistency
2. Enable frequent users to use shortcuts
3. Offer informative feedback
4. Design dialog to yield closure
5. Offer simple error handling
6. Permit easy reversal of actions
7. Support internal focus of control
8. Reduce short-term memory load
- No user study was conducted of Sketchpad was not conducted, since Sutherland was
a student of electrical engineering (if it were in the field of industrial engineering,
user testing would have been more likely)
1.4 Invention of the mouse (1963)
- Computer mouse: invented by Douglas Engelbart in 1963 (before mouse -> typing
commands) which symbolizes the emergence of HCI
- Douglas needed an improved pointing device for a project namely early hypertext
system NLS (oNLine System)
, - Initial testing of the mouse focused on selecting and manipulating text
- Engelbart, English and Bernman conducted an experiment comparing input devices
capable of both selection and x-y position control of an on-screen cursor:
o Mouse
o Light pen was operated like Sutherland’s pen
o Joystick had a moving stick and was operated in
2 control modes and a switch:
absolute or position-control mode: the
cursor’s position on the display had
absolute correspondence to the position
of the stick
rate-control mode: cursor’s velocity was
determined by the amount of stick deflection while the direction of
the cursor’s motion was determined by the direction of the stick
An embedded switch for selection was activated by pressing down on
the stick
o Knee-controlled lever was connected to two
potentiometers. Side-to-side knee motion
controlled x-axis cursor movement and up-and-
down knee motion controlled y-axis cursor
movement. Device had no selection method;
instead, key on keyboard was used
o Grafacon was commercial device used for tracing
curves. Originally, there was a pen at the end of the arm; however, this was
replaced with a knob-and-switch assembly. The user gripped the knob and
moved it about to control the on-screen cursor. Pressing the knob caused a
selection.
- Point-select or point-and-click = selection operation
- Operating device from the display meant some form of on-screen tracker (cursor) to
establish correspondence between the device space and the display space
1.5 Xerox star (1981)
- National Computer Conference (NCC) was the yearly conference for computing.
- In the 1981 NCC Xerox was the star of the show
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