A Personal Dictionary of Human-Computer Interaction

Introduction

What you will find here is an account of a reading course in human-computer interaction (HCI). It includes summaries to a number of articles and books that I have read andsome links to good sources of information on the net.

This is actually also an attempt to put an old idea of mine into practical use, by implementing it on my own research situation. The idea I am referring to is called a Personal Dictionary (PD). A PD is supposed to be a part of a system for supporting computer users called Mike's Electronic Support System (MESS). I wrote a paper about this in -93 but have not put it into any practical use, until now. The paper was written in Swedish but there is an extended abstract available in English.

The PD was supposed to work as a on-line manual where the user could edit an initial set of hyper-linked documents. He would also have been able to mark parts that he had read and found uselful in order to gradually make the information his. Another main feature of MESS was that a consultant also could provide information to the user's PD and that they could use the PD as a common reference for discussing the user's problems in synchronous and asynchronous on-line communications.

Since then the World-Wide Web (WWW) has come along providing a suitable medium for many of these ideas. And my research studies has provided me with a suitable problem situation. If I view myself as a user (of knowledge in my field of research) and WWW as the on-line manual, it is apparent that some sort of personal interface to this vast amount of information could be useful, so why not try to build a PD of HCI as a subset of WWW where some material is existing resources and some is added by me in the form of summaries and abstracts.

The PD will serve as a course examination, but I also hope to find it useful as a foundation and context for further research. Finally, it may even be of some use for somebody else...

Section one to five have been dictated by my research supervisor as mandatory for the course examination. The course also included a practical phase which will be presented in section six.

1. Problems and issues in HCI.
2. Different research directions.
3. Principles for design of user interfaces and their relation to HCI.
4. Critisism and debate.
5. Important articles, books, conferences, journals and other information resources.
6. Application exercise.
7. References.

1. Problems and issues in HCI.

In this section I have placed a summary of an article by Baecker and Buxton called A Historical and Intellectual Perspective (Preece & Keller, 1990) that lays the ground for the rest of the contents by taking a look at the origins of the discipline.

2. Different research directions.

This section features a summary of an article called Four Different Perspectives on Human-Computer Interaction by Kammersgaard (Preece & Keller, 1990).

3. Principles for design of user interfaces and their relation to HCI.

This section features a brief look at a well known article about the ground breaking work at Xerox PARC in the late seventies called  Designing the Star User Interface by Smith et al. (1990). Then comes a short summary of an article by Shackel called Human Factors and Usability (1990), that presents a synthesis of different approaches to design for usability. As a progression from those ideas I then take a look the article From Human Factors to Human Actors (Bannon, 1991).

As a sort of extra feature I have also taken a look at a connection between HCI and artificial intelligence (AI), since that was a prerequisite for this course, by giving an account for an article called Theory-Based Design for Easily Learned Interfaces (Polson & Lewis, 1990).

4. Critisism and debate.

This part includes an extensive summary of Lucy Suchman's dissertation called Plans and situated actions: The problem of human-machine communication (1987), which is a critique of a help system for a photocopier based on the assumption that help systems can understand the user's needs by trying to infer the user's plan based on some parameters describing the state of the system. The critisism is also directed generally towards AI's view of how the human mind works, and the decompositional work analysis approach of task analysis. The book is the most famous example of ethnography in HCI.

5. Important articles, books, conferences, journals and other information resources.

Several attempts have been made to make the HCI resource inventory on WWW. Instead of trying to re-invent the wheel yet again, I have collected a few links to some of these existing resources. Even this small selction is partly redundant since they make cross-references to eachother (but this could be said about any list of WWW links since everything is linked to everything in some way or another 8-).

• The HCI Bibliography
  An On-line bibliographic database on HCI.
• ACM SIGCHI: HCI-sites
  A collection of links to HCI-sites.
• HCI Index
  A collection of HCI resources on the Internet.
• Human-Computer Interaction Resources on the Net
  A collection of information related to HCI.
• The HCI Bibliography Project
  Includes bibliographic information on books, reports, conferences, journals, information on publishers and more.

6. Application exercise.

As a part of the course examination I have written a computer application that was based on ideas from the course litterature. I wrote a program called Badis, using Brenda Laurel's (1993) framework of dramatic theory for design of human-computer experiences. A paper concerning this project is published in the proceedings to the IRIS19 conference. Here is the abstract. If you have a Macintosh or PC-compatible computer you can download and run the program [Mac] [PC] (3 MB / in Swedish).

References.