Human–computer interaction
The term was popularized by Stuart K. Card, Allen Newell, and Thomas P. Moran in their 1983 book, The Psychology of Human–Computer Interaction.
On the machine side, techniques in computer graphics, operating systems, programming languages, and development environments are relevant.
[8] How usability is to be precisely understood, how it relates to other social and cultural values, and when it is, and when it may not be a desirable property of computer interfaces is increasingly debated.
When pursuing a cognitivist perspective, researchers of HCI may seek to align computer interfaces with the mental model that humans have of their activities.
Early techniques treated clients' psychological procedures as unsurprising and quantifiable and urged plan specialists to look at subjective science to establish zones, (for example, memory and consideration) when structuring UIs.
Displays are human-made artifacts designed to support the perception of relevant system variables and facilitate further processing of that information.
Christopher Wickens et al. defined 13 principles of display design in their book An Introduction to Human Factors Engineering.
[17] These human perception and information processing principles can be utilized to create an effective display design.
A display should look like the variable that it represents (e.g., the high temperature on a thermometer shown as a higher vertical level).
When the user's attention is diverted from one location to another to access necessary information, there is an associated cost in time or effort.
A display design should minimize this cost by allowing frequently accessed sources to be located at the nearest possible position.
Information access costs should be low, which can be achieved in many ways (e.g., proximity, linkage by common colors, patterns, shapes, etc.).
[19] Other research finds that individuals perceive their interactions with computers more negatively than humans, despite behaving the same way towards these machines.
Ontology, as a formal representation of domain-specific knowledge, can be used to address this problem by solving the semantic ambiguities between the two parties.
The potential of telling human emotions in an automated and digital fashion lies in improvements to the effectiveness of human–computer interaction.
The influence of emotions in human–computer interaction has been studied in fields such as financial decision-making using ECG and organizational knowledge sharing using eye-tracking and face readers as affect-detection channels.
A brain–computer interface (BCI), is a direct communication pathway between an enhanced or wired brain and an external device.
BCIs are often directed at researching, mapping, assisting, augmenting, or repairing human cognitive or sensory-motor functions.
Its aim, in plain terms, is to improve the usability of security features in end user applications.
Unlike HCI, which has roots in the early days of Xerox PARC during the 1970s, HCISec is a nascent field of study by comparison.
Interest in this topic tracks with that of Internet security, which has become an area of broad public concern only in very recent years.
When security features exhibit poor usability, the following are common reasons: Traditionally, computer use was modeled as a human–computer dyad in which the two were connected by a narrow explicit communication channel, such as text-based terminals.
Much work has been done to make the interaction between a computing system and a human more reflective of the multidimensional nature of everyday communication.
Because of potential issues, human–computer interaction shifted focus beyond the interface to respond to observations as articulated by Douglas Engelbart: "If ease of use were the only valid criterion, people would stick to tricycles and never try bicycles.
These forces include: As of 2010[update] the future for HCI is expected[24] to include the following characteristics: One of the main conferences for new research in human–computer interaction is the annually held Association for Computing Machinery's (ACM) Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, usually referred to by its short name CHI (pronounced kai, or Khai).
It is attended by academics, practitioners, and industry people, with company sponsors such as Google, Microsoft, and PayPal.
There are also dozens of other smaller, regional, or specialized HCI-related conferences held around the world each year, including:[25]
Software and hardware are matched so that the processing of the user input is fast enough, and the latency of the computer output is not disruptive to the workflow .