Human Computer Interaction

Lecture 09

Interaction Paradigms
 Metaphor
• Relating computing to other real-world activity is effective
teaching technique
– LOGO's turtle dragging its tail
– file management on an office desktop (First time used by Xerox
Alto and Star)
– financial analysis on spreadsheets
– Keyboard use in word processor as a typewriter
– virtual reality – user inside the metaphor
• Problems
– some tasks do not fit into a given metaphor
• Scanning a file for viruses
– cultural bias
• It should not be assumed that a metaphor will apply across national
boundaries
 Direct Manipulation
• Designers noted that their products were gaining popularity
as their visual content increased
• 1982 – Shneiderman coined this phrase. He described
– visibility of objects
– incremental action and rapid feedback
– syntactic correctness of all actions
– replace complex command languages with direct actions (hence the
term “direct” manipulation)

• In 1984 – First Macintosh personal computer demonstrated

the inherent usability of direct manipulation.
 Direct Manipulation
• Direct manipulation for the desktop metaphor requires
files and folders to be made visible representing
underlying files and directories

• The model-world metaphor

• What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG)
 Hypertext
• 1945 – Vannevar Bush and the memex

• key to success in managing explosion of information

• mid 1960s – Nelson describes hypertext as non-linear

browsing structure

• hypermedia and multimedia

 Multimodality
• Mode: a mode is a human communication channel e.g.
Visual, audio or haptic (touch)

• Multimodality means simultaneous use of multiple channels

for input and output

• A multi-modal interactive system is that which relies on the

use of multiple human communication channels.

• We can say that all interactive systems are multimodal

because all use at least two human channels i.e. Visual and
hepatic
 Computer Supported Cooperative Work
(CSCW)
• CSCW is collaboration of individuals via computer

• Emerged with the advent of strong computer networks

• CSCW removes bias of single user / single computer system

Computer Supported Cooperative Work
(CSCW)
• Can no longer neglect the social aspects

• Electronic mail is most prominent success

– A metaphor of conventional mail system
– An example of asynchronous CSCW system
• CSCW systems built to support users working in groups
are referred to as groupware (Ch 19)
 The World Wide Web

• Internet is simply a collection of computers linked

together. WWW builds on top of it.
• Hypertext, as originally realized, was a closed system
• Simple, universal protocols (e.g. HTTP), mark-up
languages (e.g. HTML) and global naming scheme (URLs)
made publishing and accessing easy conceive
• First envisioned by Tim Berners-Lee.
• First text based browser in 1991
• Several graphical browsers in 1993(Mosaic)
 Agent-based Interfaces
• Agent?
– People who work on someone’s behalf e.g. estate agents, travel
agents, secret agents etc.
• Software agents?
– Software which act on behalf of users within electronic world e.g.
web crawlers which search the WWW for documents that user
might find interesting, email spam filtering
• Some agents use artificial intelligence techniques to learn,
called intelligent agents.
– E.g. Eager(performs repeated actions for the user)
• Even some intelligent agents are there that don’t have a
clear embodiment
– Summing function of a Spreadsheet
 Ubiquitous Computing
• Based on the idea of moving human-computer interaction
away from the desktop and out into out everyday lives.

“The most profound technologies are those that disappear.”

Mark Weiser, 1991

• Also called pervasive computing

• Late 1980’s: computer was very apparent

• How to make it disappear?

– Shrink and embed/distribute it in the physical world
– Design interactions that don’t demand our intention
 Sensor-based and Context-aware
Interaction
• Embedment of computation even deeper, but unobtrusively,
in our day-to-day life.
• The user is totally unaware of the interaction taking place.
• Information is gathered from sensors in Environment
• Examples: Washbasin, automatic doors, lights turned on
automatically
• This information can be used to modify explicit interfaces, do
things in background etc.
 Sensor-based and Context-aware
Interaction
• Automatic sensing is an imperfect activity. So actions from
these ‘intelligent predictions’ should be made with
caution.
• There are two principles of appropriate intelligence
– Be right as often as possible, and useful when acting on these
predictions
– Do not cause extravagant problems in the event of an action
resulting from a wrong prediction
• The failure of must intelligent systems in past resulted
from following the first principle, but not the second.