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Vol.30 No.3, July 1998
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Many undergraduate computer science students have little formal exposure to Human Computer Interaction while in school. As students of HCI at various levels (undergraduate, recently completed Masters, and Ph.D. candidate), we have picked some of the articles and books that have had the most impact on our education. These selections either got us started on the road to studying HCI or expanded our knowledge in a significant way. We would offer these as a starting point to any student who wants to know more about the roots and principles of HCI. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but rather what we felt particularly interesting or insightful.
Several computer science disciplines claim Vannevar Bush as their father. CHI, Hypermedia, and Information Retrieval, among others, all have roots that can be found in his 1945 Atlantic Monthly article, "As We May Think." Bush's article is good reading for anyone interested in these fields as it gives a solid historical basis from which to read the rest of the literature in these topics. It also stresses the human in the human-machine interface.
Bush describes a machine he terms the "Memex," short for "memory extender." It is designed to allow an individual to access media in a way that is specific to each user. Bush is the first to introduce the concepts of links, referring to them as "trails" through the literature. He is also one of the first to view the human as a unique information processing machine and explore the ways a computing device can aid the human in that processing. It is a different perspective than many seen today---the computer augmenting man's abilities rather than substituting for them.
Students interested in HCI would be advised to pay close attention to section 7 of Bush's article. Here he moves from how science will enable great computing machines to how the human mind operates. He stresses how technology is advancing everyday, and how it can be put to use helping man become more than he could be on his own. This scientist writing to ask what his fellow scientists are supposed to do know that the war they had spent so much time working for is over ending up writing one of the great pieces of literature for many fields of computing.
This is a book that captures and illustrates everything that usability engineering strives to achieve. Norman illustrates in several fascinating, down-to-earth examples, that the inability of many people to operate devices does not lie with the person but instead with the product design. He cites examples such as the VCR, the office telephone, and the UNIX operating system. He gives a great example concerning the operation of a range top, how the placement of the knobs does not correspond mentally to the placement of the burners. He also deals with more serious examples, such as the Three Mile Island Incident. He uses these examples to illustrate products and the consequences of ignoring the needs of users and the principles of cognitive psychology.
Norman points out the common usability problems with many devices, ambiguous controls, counter-intuitive relationships between controls and functions, no feedback mechanisms, and too complicated control sequences. He follows up these problems with the now famous Norman Principles. Norman extorts making thing visible, using natural relationships between control and function, simplifying, designing for mistakes, constraining, and standardizing. In addition to be extremely informative, the book is entertaining and lively.
Chapanis's article deals with the human factors area that many people ignore, namely the language and words attached to the tools that humans must operate. He takes and then artfully supports the position that improvements in the human-machine dialogue can lead to greater performance improvements than human engineering of the machine itself. Chapanis points out that the study of words should be a classic usability field of study because language is a uniquely human activity, the relationship of human-machine is defined by words, and machines cannot be operated without words.
He states some problem areas with words and their usage in the human-machine interaction. First, the human factors engineering language itself is a problem. Chapanis points out that is easy to be obscure in writing, but it is difficult to be clear and concise. Second, the words that go with the machines we build are a problem. If it is a goal of human engineering to design machines to be easier to use, then it must also be a goal to improve the instructions that accompany these machines. Finally, Chapanis addresses the multitude of languages and the need to address human-machine communication from a multi-national perspective. He sprinkles the articles with many entertaining examples to illustrate his points.
For seminal articles in the fields of human engineering, few can compare to Miller's 1956 article. He begins the article with an interesting tale of being haunted by an integer, the number seven (7). He relates how seven has appeared numerous times, occasional a little larger or a little smaller, in a variety of fields of research. Miller than develops the theory that there is a limit to how much information that a person can remember. This is immediate memory, single dimensional information such a series of numbers, tones, or events. This limit is seven, give or take two (2). He supports his position by citing numerous studies by a variety of researchers using various information sources, such as tones and colors.
Obviously, people can remember more than seven items. Miller goes on to say that the only ways to over come this limit to memory is through recoding or grouping. A person groups bits of information together to form larger groups of information that can also be grouped together. In other words, people add more dimensions to the information to increase memory limits.
One of the most entertaining portions of the article comes at the end, when Miller recants numerous examples of the number seven in religion, time, rating scales, history, Greek mythology, color, and music. Overall, it is everything an article should be, informative and exciting to read.
The Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction is a book that describes the role of applied cognitive psychology in the design of the human-computer interface. The book presents a design approach that differs from the traditional role of evaluation that the field of human factors has taken. The approach presented is theory-based, it is the theory of the individual: the study of all psychological functioning including motor, perceptual and cognitive.
The book proposes a model of the human information processor, the Model Human Processor (MHP), and a model for information processing analysis of cognitive tasks, the GOMS model. The MHP is suited to an applied psychology and is justified by the current psychological research. Both of the models, MHP and GOMS, are analyzed and validated as both evaluative and analytical techniques. All of the experiments in The Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction are provide a detailed examination of text editing and the text editors of the late 1970s.
The book summarizes the proposed model of human information processing and by providing extensions and generalizations. The book demonstrates how GOMS analysis can be used for semi-creative tasks where the task are generated by the user and not explicitly given. All of the text editing studies are placed into a larger theoretical context, and the relationship between cognitive skill (such as text editing) is discussed. The book concludes by presenting a framework for applying psychology to systems design. This framework describes a set of structural variables for describing the human-computer system and a set of performance variables for characterizing the behavior with these systems. The book ends with 10 principles for user interface designers to follow.
The techniques and principles presented in The Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction have served to guide the development of cognitive engineering models and the explicit analyses of the knowledge people need to perform a task. The book represents a significant advance how cognitive modeling was conducted at the time (Olson & Olson, 1990). Researchers have confirmed the basic parameters in the book and have extended the model to include such tasks as CAD modeling, information retrieval, telephone operators, and video games (John & Kieras, 1996). This book is the beginning of a revolution in cognitive modeling and applying psychology to the design of the human-computer interface. It is a required addition to the libraries for those design human-computer systems.
These books and articles are not meant as a comprehensive list of readings for students interested in human-computer interaction. They are seminal works that have affected how we have approached the study of human-computer interactions. Other resources and bibliographies of human-computer interaction works are available on-line including ACM SIGCHI's Curricula in Human-Computer Interaction (http://www.acm.org/sigchi/cdg/) and Andrew Sears' HCI Reading List (http://www.depaul.edu/~asears/hci/readings.html).
Bush, V. (1945). As We May Think. Atlantic Monthly, July 1945.
Card, S. K., Moran, T. P., & Newell, A. (1983). The Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Chapanis, A. (1965). Words, words, words. Human Factors, 2, 1-17.
John, B. E. & Kieras, D. E. (1996). The GOMS family of user interface analysis techniques: Comparison and contrast. ACM Transactions of Computer-Human Interaction, 3(4), 320-351.
Miller, George A. (1956). The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information. The Psychological Review, 63, 81-97. Also at http://www.well.com/user/smalin/miller.html
Norman, Donald A. (1988). The Psychology of Everyday Things. New York: Basic Books.
Olson, J. R. & Olson, G. M. (1990). The growth of cognitive modeling in human-computer interaction since GOMS. Human-Computer Interaction, 5, 221-265.
David C. Crow is a Member of the Technical Staff responsible for Human-Computer Interaction Research at Rockwell Collins, Inc. in Downers Grove, IL. His research interests include cognitive modeling, task analysis and information visualization. David can be reached at david.crow@acm.org.
Major Jim Jansen is an Instructor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the United States Military Academy and a Ph.D. Candidate at Texas A&M University. His research interests and expertise include computer-human interaction, information retrieval, and software agents. He is currently conducting research in the combined use of agents and information search engines. Email: jansen@exmail.usma.edu Web Site: http://www.eecs.usma.edu/usma/academic/eecs/instruct/jansen/
Erika (Gernand) Orrick will be a first year Master's student in Cognitive Systems Engineering at Ohio State University in the fall. Her research interests include computer-human interaction and computer supported cooperative work. In addition to her Bulletin work, she serves as Managing Editor for ACM's student magazine, Crossroads. She can be reached at erika.orrick@acm.org.
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