HCI – CS2013 Version

Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)

Human–computer interaction (HCI) is concerned with designing interactions between human activities and the computational systems that support them, and with constructing interfaces to afford those interactions.

Interaction between users and computational artefacts occurs at an interface that includes both software and hardware. Thus interface design impacts the software life-cycle in that it should occur early; the design and implementation of core functionality can influence the user interface – for better or worse.

Because it deals with people as well as computational systems, as a knowledge area HCI demands the consideration of cultural, social, organizational, cognitive and perceptual issues. Consequently it draws on a variety of disciplinary traditions, including psychology, ergonomics, computer science, graphic and product design, anthropology and engineering.

HCI: Human Computer Interaction (4 Core-Tier1 hours, 4 Core-Tier2 hours)

	Core-Tier1 hours	Core-Tier2 hours	Includes Electives
HCI/Foundations	4		N
HCI/Designing Interaction		4	N
HCI/Programming Interactive Systems			Y
HCI/User-Centered Design & Testing			Y
HCI/New Interactive Technologies			Y
HCI/Collaboration & Communication			Y
HCI/Statistical Methods for HCI			Y
HCI/Human Factors & Security			Y
HCI/Design-Oriented HCI			Y
HCI/Mixed, Augmented and Virtual Reality			Y

 

 

HCI/Foundations

[4 Core-Tier1 hours]

Motivation: For end-users, the interface is the system. So design in this domain must be interaction-focused and human-centered. Students need a different repertoire of techniques to address this than is provided elsewhere in the curriculum.

Topics:

• Contexts for HCI (anything with a user interface, e.g., webpage, business applications, mobile applications, and games)
• Processes for user-centered development, e.g., early focus on users, empirical testing, iterative design.
• Different measures for evaluation, e.g., utility, efficiency, learnability, user satisfaction.
• Usability heuristics and the principles of usability testing.
• Physical capabilities that inform interaction design, e.g., colour perception, ergonomics
• Cognitive models that inform interaction design, e.g., attention, perception and recognition, movement, and memory. Gulfs of expectation and execution.
• Social models that inform interaction design, e.g., culture, communication, networks and organizations.
• Principles of good design and good designers; engineering tradeoffs
• Accessibility, e.g., interfaces for differently-abled populations (e.g., blind, motion-impaired)
• Interfaces for differently-aged population groups (e.g., children, 80+)

 

Learning Outcomes: 

1. Discuss why human-centered software development is important. [Familiarity]
2. Summarize the basic precepts of psychological and social interaction. [Familiarity]
3. Develop and use a conceptual vocabulary for analyzing human interaction with software: affordance, conceptual model, feedback, and so forth. [Usage]
4. Define a user-centered design process that explicitly takes account of the fact that the user is not like the developer or their acquaintances. [Usage]
5. Create and conduct a simple usability test for an existing software application. [Assessment]

 

HCI/Designing Interaction

[4 Core-Tier2 hours]

Motivation: CS students need a minimal set of well-established methods and tools to bring to interface construction.

Topics:

• Principles of graphical user interfaces (GUIs)
• Elements of visual design (layout, color, fonts, labeling)
• Task analysis, including qualitative aspects of generating task analytic models
• Low-fidelity (paper) prototyping
• Quantitative evaluation techniques, e.g., keystroke-level evaluation
• Help and documentation
• Handling human/system failure
• User interface standards

 

 

Learning Outcomes:

1. For an identified user group, undertake and document an analysis of their needs. [Assessment]
2. Create a simple application, together with help and documentation, that supports a graphical user interface. [Usage]
3. Conduct a quantitative evaluation and discuss/report the results. [Usage]
4. Discuss at least one national or international user interface design standard. [Familiarity]

 

HCI/Programming Interactive Systems

[Elective]

Motivation: To take a user-experience-centered view of software development and then cover approaches and technologies to make that happen.

Topics:

• Software Architecture Patterns, e.g., Model-View controller; command objects, online, offline (cross reference PL/Event Driven and Reactive Programming, where MVC is used in the context of event-driven programming)
• Interaction Design Patterns: visual hierarchy, navigational distance
• Event management and user interaction
• Geometry management (cross reference GV/Geometric Modelling)
• Choosing interaction styles and interaction techniques
• Presenting information: navigation, representation, manipulation
• Interface animation techniques (e.g., scene graphs)
• Widget classes and libraries
• Modern GUI libraries (e.g. iOS, Android, JavaFX) GUI builders and UI programming environments (cross reference to PBD/Mobile Platforms)
• Declarative Interface Specification: Stylesheets and DOMs
• Data-driven applications (database-backed web pages)
• Cross-platform design
• Design for resource-constrained devices (e.g. small, mobile devices)

 

Learning Outcomes:

1. Explain the importance of Model-View controller to interface programming. [Familiarity]
2. Create an application with a modern graphical user interface. [Usage]
3. Identify commonalities and differences in UIs across different platforms. [Familiarity]
4. Explain and use GUI programming concepts: event handling, constraint-based layout management, etc. [Familiarity]

 

HCI/User-Centered Design and Testing

[Elective]

Motivation: An exploration of techniques to ensure that end-users are fully considered at all stages of the design process, from inception to implementation.

Topics:

• Approaches to, and characteristics of, the design process
• Functionality and usability requirements (cross reference to SE/Requirements Engineering)
• Techniques for gathering requirements, e.g., interviews, surveys, ethnographic and contextual enquiry
• Techniques and tools for the analysis and presentation of requirements, e.g., reports, personas
• Prototyping techniques and tools, e.g., sketching, storyboards, low-fidelity prototyping, wireframes
• Evaluation without users, using both qualitative and quantitative techniques, e.g., walkthroughs, GOMS, expert-based analysis, heuristics, guidelines, and standards
• Evaluation with users, e.g., observation, think-aloud, interview, survey, experiment.
• Challenges to effective evaluation, e.g., sampling, generalization.
• Reporting the results of evaluations
• Internationalization, designing for users from other cultures, cross-cultural

 

Learning Outcomes:

1. Explain how user-centred design complements other software process models. [Familiarity]
2. Use lo-fi (low fidelity) prototyping techniques to gather, and report, user responses. [Usage]
3. Choose appropriate methods to support the development of a specific UI. [Assessment]
4. Use a variety of techniques to evaluate a given UI. [Assessment]
5. Compare the constraints and benefits of different evaluative methods. [Assessment]

 

HCI/New Interactive Technologies

[Elective]

Motivation: As technologies evolve, new interaction styles are made possible. This knowledge unit should be considered extensible, to track emergent technology.

Topics:

• Choosing interaction styles and interaction techniques
• Representing information to users: navigation, representation, manipulation
• Approaches to design, implementation and evaluation of non-mouse interaction
  • Touch and multi-touch interfaces
  • Shared, embodied, and large interfaces
  • New input modalities (such as sensor and location data)
  • New Windows, e.g., iPhone, Android
  • Speech recognition and natural language processing (cross reference IS/Natural Language Processing)
  • Wearable and tangible interfaces
  • Persuasive interaction and emotion
  • Ubiquitious and context-aware interaction technologies (Ubicomp)
  • Bayesian inference (e.g. predictive text, guided pointing)
  • Ambient/peripheral display and interaction

 

Learning Outcomes:

1. Describe when non-mouse interfaces are appropriate. [Familiarity]
2. Understand the interaction possibilities beyond mouse-and-pointer interfaces. [Familiarity]
3. Discuss the advantages (and disadvantages) of non-mouse interfaces. [Assessment]

 

HCI/Collaboration and Communication

[Elective]

Motivation: Computer interfaces not only support users in achieving their individual goals but also in their interaction with others, whether that is task-focussed (work or gaming) or task-unfocussed (social networking).

Topics:

• Asynchronous group communication, e.g., e-mail, forums, social networks
• Synchronous group communication, e.g., chat rooms, conferencing, online games
• Social media, social computing, and social network analysis
• Online collaboration, ‘smart’ spaces, and social coordination aspects of workflow technologies
• Online communities
• Software characters and intelligent agents, virtual worlds and avatars (cross-reference IS/Agents)
• Social psychology

 

Learning Outcomes:

1. Describe the difference between synchronous and asynchronous communication. [Familiarity]
2. Compare the HCI issues in individual interaction with group interaction. [Assessment]
3. Discuss several issues of social concern raised by collaborative software. [Familiarity]
4. Discuss the HCI issues in software that embodies human intention. [Familiarity]

 

HCI/Statistical Methods for HCI

[Elective]

Motivation: Much HCI work depends on the proper use, understanding and application of statistics. This knowledge is often held by students who join the field from psychology, but less common in students with a CS background.

Topics:

• t-tests
• ANOVA
• Randomization (non-parametric) testing, within v. between-subjects design
• Calculating effect size
• Exploratory data analysis
• Presenting statistical data
• Combining qualitative and quantitative results

 

Learning Outcomes:

1. Explain basic statistical concepts and their areas of application. [Familiarity]
2. Extract and articulate the statistical arguments used in papers that quantitatively report user studies. [Usage]
3. Design a user study that will yield quantitative results. [Usage]
4. Conduct and report on a study that utilizes both qualitative and quantitative evaluation. [Usage]

 

HCI/Human Factors and Security

[Elective]

Motivation: Effective interface design requires basic knowledge of security psychology. Many attacks do not have a technological basis, but exploit human propensities and vulnerabilities. “Only amateurs attack machines; professionals target people” (Bruce Schneier)

Topics:

• Applied psychology and security policies
• Security economics
• Regulatory environments – responsibility, liability and self-determination
• Organizational vulnerabilities and threats
• Usability design and security
• Pretext, impersonation and fraud, e.g., phishing and spear phishing (cross reference IAS/Threats and Attacks)
• Trust, privacy and deception
• Biometric authentication (camera, voice)
• Identity management

 

Learning Outcomes:

1. Explain the concepts of phishing and spear phishing, and how to recognize them. [Familiarity]
2. Describe the issues of trust in interface design with an example of a high and low trust system. [Assessment]
3. Design a user interface for a security mechanism. [Assessment]
4. Explain the concept of identity management and its importance. [Familiarity]
5. Analyze a security policy and/or procedures to show where they consider, or fail to consider, human factors. [Usage]

 

HCI/Design-Oriented HCI

[Elective]

Motivation: Some curricula will want to emphasize an understanding of the norms and values of HCI work itself as emerging from, and deployed within specific historical, disciplinary and cultural contexts.

Topics:

• Intellectual styles and perspectives to technology and its interfaces
• Consideration of HCI as a design discipline:
  • Sketching
  • Participatory design
• Critically reflective HCI
  • Critical technical practice
  • Technologies for political activism
  • Philosophy of user experience
  • Ethnography and ethnomethodology
• Indicative domains of application
  • Sustainability
  • Arts-informed computing

 

Learning Outcomes:

1. Explain what is meant by “HCI is a design-oriented discipline”. [Familiarity]
2. Detail the processes of design appropriate to specific design orientations. [Familiarity]
3. Apply a variety of design methods to a given problem. [Usage]

HCI/Mixed, Augmented and Virtual Reality

[Elective]

Motivation:  A detailed consideration of the interface components required for the creation and development of immersive environments, especially games.

Topics:

• Output
  • Sound
  • Stereoscopic display
  • Force feedback simulation, haptic devices
• User input
  • Viewer and object tracking
  • Pose and gesture recognition
  • Accelerometers
  • Fiducial markers
  • User interface issues
• Physical modelling and rendering
  • Physical simulation: collision detection & response, animation
  • Visibility computation
  • Time-critical rendering, multiple levels of details (LOD)
• System architectures
  • Game engines
  • Mobile augmented reality
  • Flight simulators
  • CAVEs
  • Medical imaging
• Networking
  • p2p, client-server, dead reckoning, encryption, synchronization
  • Distributed collaboration

 

Learning Outcomes:

1. Describe the optical model realized by a computer graphics system to synthesize stereoscopic view. [Familiarity]
2. Describe the principles of different viewer tracking technologies. [Familiarity]
3. Describe the differences between geometry- and image-based virtual reality. [Familiarity]
4. Describe the issues of user action synchronization and data consistency in a networked environment. [Familiarity]
5. Determine the basic requirements on interface, hardware, and software configurations of a VR system for a specified application. [Usage]
6. Describe several possible uses for games engines, including their potential and their limitations. [Familiarity]