Human Computer Interaction
HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION – The Psychological aspects
Human-Computer Interaction, abbreviated HCI, has simply been explained as the study of how people interact with computing technology (Olson & Olson 2003). It is the intersection between psychology and the social sciences, on the one hand, and computer science and technology, on the other. Throughout the past two decades HCI researchers have been analysing and designing specific user interface technologies, studying and improving the processes of technology development and developing and evaluating new applications of technology with the aim of producing software and hardware that are useful, usable and artistic. This led to development of a body of technical knowledge and methodology.
Psychologists have made numerous efforts to understand in detail the involvement of cognitive, perceptual and motor components in the moment-by-moment interaction a person encounters when working at a computer. This line of work was started by Card et al. (1983). Their research was based on the separation of computer use knowledge from what operates on the knowledge to derive a specific behaviour with this approach it was claimed that one could determine several important behaviours. Later a number of researchers built on this original work, adding ore to it. The most significant addition to this was Kieras and Meyer (1997) with their popular ‘EPIC’. Cognitive modeling has also been quite practical. Gray et al. (1993), for example, applied it to the evaluation of two telephone operator keyboards predicting and confirming enacting times between the two. Others have applied it to the application designs like CAD for the banking and Engineering sectors. Although this model has been said to be very powerful, it’s application is not universal. That brings us to the second line of theoretical research; Distributed Cognition.
Distributed Cognition focuses more on the social and contextual aspects of work. It recognises how people’s
Human-Computer Interaction, abbreviated HCI, has simply been explained as the study of how people interact with computing technology (Olson & Olson 2003). It is the intersection between psychology and the social sciences, on the one hand, and computer science and technology, on the other. Throughout the past two decades HCI researchers have been analysing and designing specific user interface technologies, studying and improving the processes of technology development and developing and evaluating new applications of technology with the aim of producing software and hardware that are useful, usable and artistic. This led to development of a body of technical knowledge and methodology.
Psychologists have made numerous efforts to understand in detail the involvement of cognitive, perceptual and motor components in the moment-by-moment interaction a person encounters when working at a computer. This line of work was started by Card et al. (1983). Their research was based on the separation of computer use knowledge from what operates on the knowledge to derive a specific behaviour with this approach it was claimed that one could determine several important behaviours. Later a number of researchers built on this original work, adding ore to it. The most significant addition to this was Kieras and Meyer (1997) with their popular ‘EPIC’. Cognitive modeling has also been quite practical. Gray et al. (1993), for example, applied it to the evaluation of two telephone operator keyboards predicting and confirming enacting times between the two. Others have applied it to the application designs like CAD for the banking and Engineering sectors. Although this model has been said to be very powerful, it’s application is not universal. That brings us to the second line of theoretical research; Distributed Cognition.
Distributed Cognition focuses more on the social and contextual aspects of work. It recognises how people’s