Copyright © 1999 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Human-computer interaction (HCI) studies how people design, implement, and use computer interfaces. With computer -based systems playing increasingly significant roles in our lives and in the basic infrastructure of science, business, and society, HCI is an area of singular importance. A key to understanding human-computer interaction is to appreciate that interactive interfaces mediate redistribution of cognitive tasks between people and machines.
Designed to aid cognition and simplify tasks, interfaces function as COGNITIVE ARTIFACTS. Two features distinguish interfaces from other cognitive artifacts: they provide the most plastic representational medium we have ever known, and they enable novel forms of communication. Interfaces are plastic in the sense that they can readily mimic representational characteristics of other media. This plasticity in combination with the dynamic character of computation makes possible new interactive representations and forms of communication that are impossible in other media.
The historical roots of human-computer interaction can be traced to a human information-processing approach to cognitive psychology. Human information processing (Card, Moran, and Newell 1983; Lindsay and Norman 1977) explicitly took the digital computer as the primary metaphorical resource for thinking about cognition. HCI as a field grew out of early human information-processing research and still reflects that lineage. Just as cognitive psychology focused on identifying the characteristics of individual cognition, human-computer interaction has, until very recently, focused almost exclusively on single individuals interacting with applications derived from decompositions of work activities into individual tasks. This theoretical approach has dominated human-computer interaction for over twenty years, leading to a computing infrastructure built around the personal computer and based on the desktop interface metaphor.
The desktop metaphor and associated graphical user interface evolved from Sutherland's Sketchpad (Sutherland 1963), a seminal system that introduced the interactive graphical interface in the early 1960s. The desktop metaphor and underlying technologies on which it is based were cast in modern form in a number of university and industrial research centers, most notably Xerox Parc. We now see the legacy of that work in the ubiquitous graphical interface of current commercial systems. Their interfaces bear startling resemblances to those of the early Xerox Alto (Lampson 1988). What has changed since the days of the Alto, in addition to the continual doubling of computing power every eighteen months and all that this doubling makes possible, is that we now have more principled understandings of how to create effective interfaces. This is primarily a result of the development and acceptance of user-centered approaches (Norman and Draper 1986; Nielsen 1993; Nickerson and Landauer 1997) to system design.
Research in human-computer interaction (Helenader, Landauer, and Prabhu 1997), as in most of the cognitive sciences, draws on many disciplines in that it involves both people and computer technologies. The goal of creating effective and enjoyable systems for people to use makes HCI a design activity (Winograd 1996). As designed artifacts, interface development involves what Schon (1983) terms a reflective conversation with materials. To be effective, though, interfaces must be well suited to and situated in the environments of users. Designers must ensure that they remain centered on human concerns. Thus, although HCI can be viewed simply as an important area of software design, inasmuch as interfaces account for more than 50 percent of code and significant portions of design effort, it is much more than that. Interfaces are the locus for new interactive representations and make possible new classes of computationally based work materials.
There are many spheres of research activity in HCI. Three areas are of special interest. The first draws on what we know about human perception and cognition, coupling it with task analysis methods, to develop an engineering discipline for HCI. For examples, see the early work of Card, Moran, and Newell (1983) on the psychology of human-computer interaction, analysis techniques based on models of human performance (John and Kieras 1997), the evolving subdiscipline of usability engineering (Nielsen 1993), work on human error (Woods 1988; Reason 1990), and the development of toolkits for interface design (Myers, Hollan, and Cruz 1996).
A second research activity explores interfaces that expand representational possibilities beyond the menus and icons of the desktop metaphor. The new field of information visualization (Hollan, Bederson, and Helfman 1997) provides many examples. The Information Visualizer (Card, Robertson, and Mackinlay 1991), a cognitive coprocessor architecture and collection of 3-D visualization techniques, supports navigation and browsing of large information spaces. Numerous techniques are being developed to help visualize large complex systems (Eick and Joseph 1993; Church and Helfman 1993), gather histories of interactions with digital objects (Hill and Hollan 1994; Eick and Joseph 1993), and provide interactive multiscale views of information spaces (Perlin and Fox 1993; Bederson et al. 1996).
A third active research area is computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW). (See Olson and Olson [1997] for a recent survey.) The roots of CSCW can be traced to Engelbart's NLS system (Engelbart and English 1994). Among other things, it provided the first demonstration of computer-mediated interactions between people at remote sites. CSCW takes seriously what Hutchins (1995) has termed distributed cognition to highlight the fact that most thinking tasks involve multiple individuals and shared artifacts.
Overall, as Grudin (1993) has pointed out, we can view the development of HCI as a movement from early concerns with low-level computer issues, to a focus on people's individual tasks and how better to support them, to current concerns with supporting collaboration and sharing of information within organizations. The phenomenal growth of the World Wide Web and the associated changes in the way we work and play are important demonstrations of the impact of interface changes on sharing information. Not to minimize the importance of the underlying technologies required for the Web (networks, file transfer protocols, etc.), it is instructive to realize that they have all been available since the early days of the Arpanet, the precursor to the modern Internet. Changes at the level of the interface, making access to information on systems almost anywhere only a matter of clicking on a link, opened the Web to users and resulted in its massive impact not only on scientific activities but also on commercial and social interaction.
Myriad important issues, ranging from complex issues of privacy and ownership of information to the challenges of creating new representations and understanding how to effectively accomplish what one might term urban planning for electronic communities, face the HCI discipline. As long as the evaluative metric continues to be whether interfaces help us accomplish our tasks more effectively and enjoyably and we continue to explore the potential of new interactive representations to allow us to know the world better and improve our relationships with others, the future of HCI will remain bright and exciting.
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Copyright © 1999 Massachusetts Institute of Technology