Aspects of HCI research for older people

HCI research has come of age, and now is a good time to reflect upon the HCI research processes that have become established over the years. This paper examines the HCI research process itself with respect to funding opportunities and the methods used for empirical research, assessing in particular the efficacy of standard methods for research dissemination. The focus of the paper is HCI research for older people. The nature of this user group is explored, and Alexandrian patterns are proposed both as a means of dissemination of research results and for strengthening the framework of HCI knowledge.     

Human computer interaction methods for electronic flight bag envisionment and design

This paper reports on the application of a range of human computer interaction (HCI) methods to the re-design of an electronic flight bag (EFB), as part of a commercial software development project. Specifically, it focusses on the use of participatory design methods, for resolving EFB usability problems. The purpose of this case study is to: (a) Show how participatory design methods can be effectively combined with ethnographic techniques and more formal methods in HCI, for the development of human-friendly EFB systems, (b) Illuminate the specific EFB usability issues encountered in this research and related HCI solutions, (c) Generate an awareness of the challenges faced by HCI practitioners adapting HCI methods to meet commercial project constraints. The HCI methodology outlined in this case study may be of interest to practitioners tasked with process and technology envisionment and/or working with limited resources.Joan Cahill has worked as an (HCI) consultant to Aircraft Management Technologies     

Security and human computer interfaces

Computer users are exposed to technology mainly through user interfaces. Most users' perceptions are based on their experience with these interfaces. HCI (human computer interaction) is concerned with these interfaces and how they can be improved. Considerable research has been conducted and major advances have been made in the area of HCI. Information security is becoming increasingly important and more complex as business is conducted electronically. However, state-of-the-art security-related product development has ignored general aspects of HCI. The objective of this paper is to promote and enable security awareness of end-users in their interaction with computer systems. It thus aims to consolidate and integrate the two fields of information security and HCI. HCI as a research discipline is a well developed field of study, and the authors are of the opinion that the use of security technologies can be significantly enhanced by employing proven HCI concepts in the design of these technologies. In order to achieve this, various criteria for a successful HCI in a security-specific environment will be examined. Part of the Windows XP Internet Connection Firewall will be used as a case study and analysed according to these criteria, and recommendations will be made.     

组态式人机界面编辑与仿真技术

人机界面在工业控制领域应用非常广泛。针对传统的人机界面画面固定、可扩展性差的问题,对组态式人机界面编辑与仿真技术进行了研究,以实现画面的可定制。首先,介绍国内外组态式人机界面的现状及技术并设计了组态式人机界面的系统结构;然后,采用面向对象技术和设计模式相结合的组件技术实现画面编辑功能,同时,完成了具备用户更好体验的仿真功能方案设计;最后,采用融合了反射技术的工厂模式实现对不同厂家的兼容性设计。该研究成果可用于指导组态式人机界面配置与仿真工具的技术研究和产品开发。     

User analysis in HCI — the historical lessons from individual differences research

User analysis is a crucial aspect of user-centered systems design, yet Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) has yet to formulate reliable and valid characterizations of users beyond gross distinctions based on task and experience. Individual differences research from mainstream psychology has identified a stable set of characteristics that would appear to offer potential application in the HCI arena. Furthermore, in its evolution over the last 100 years, research on individual differences has faced many of the problems of theoretical status and applicability that are common to HCI. In the present paper, the relationship between work in cognitive and differential psychology and current analyses of users in HCI is examined. It is concluded that HCI could gain significant predictive power if individual differences research was related to the analysis of users in contemporary systems design.     

Specifying relations between research and the design of human-computer interactions

This paper argues the need for more effective: human-computer interactions; design of such interactions; and research to support such design. More effective research for design would result in more effective human-computer interactions. One contribution to more effective research would be the specification of relations between research and the design of human-computer interactions. The aim of this paper is to propose such a specification. Frameworks for specifying relations are proposed for: disciplines; the human-computer interaction (HCI) general design problem; and validation. The frameworks are used to model, and so to specify, the relations: between HCI research and the HCI general design problem; and within the particular scope of HCI, to support HCI research. Together, the models specify the relations between HCI research and the design of human-computer interactions. Meeting these specifications renders HCI knowledge coherent, complete and “fit-for-design-purpose”. An illustration of the relations, thus specified, is provided by a model of the planning and control of multiple task work in medical reception and its hypothetical application. The same frameworks are also used to specify the relations between Cognitive Science and the understanding of natural and artificial forms of intelligence. Lastly, they are further used to identify the relations not specified between Cognitive Science and the design of human-computer interactions. The absence of such relations renders Cognitive Science knowledge not coherent, complete nor “fit-for-design-purpose” (as opposed to “fit-for-understanding-purpose”). It is proposed how the relations specified for HCI and Cognitive Science might be used in the assessment of relations between other research and the design of human-computer interactions. Finally, the paper recommends that such an assessment should be undertaken by any discipline, such as Cognitive Science, which claims a relation between its research and the design of human-computer interactions. Such an assessment would establish whether or not such relations are, or can be, specified. The paper concludes that specification of relations is required for more effective research support for the design of human-computer interactions.     

A Systematic Mapping Study of HCI Practice Research

ABSTRACT

Human–computer interaction (HCI) practice has emerged as a research domain in the HCI field and is growing. The need to transfer HCI practices to the industry began significantly with the works of Nielsen on usability engineering. To date, methods and techniques for designing, evaluating, and implementing interactive systems for human use have continued to emerge. It is, therefore, justified to conduct a systematic mapping study to determine the landscape of HCI practice research. A Systematic Mapping Study method was used to map 142 studies according to research type, topic, and contribution. These were then analyzed to determine an overview of HCI practice research. The objective was to analyze studies on HCI practice and present prominent issues that characterize the HCI practice research landscape. Second, to identify pressing challenges regarding HCI practices in software/systems development companies. The results show that HCI practice research has steadily increased since 2012. The majority of the studies explored focused on evaluation research that largely contributed to the evaluation methods or processes. Most of the studies were on design tools and techniques, design methods and contexts, design work and organizational culture, and collaboration and team communication. Interviews, case studies, and survey methods have been prominently used as research methods. HCI techniques are mostly used during the initial phase of development and during evaluation. HCI practice challenges in companies are mostly process-related and on performance of usability and user experience activities. The major challenge seems to be to find a way to collect and incorporate user feedback in a timely manner, especially in agile processes. There are areas identified in this study as needing more research.     

Emotion representation and physiology assignments in digital systems

Emotions are of increasing interest to the HCI community. Within the last decade, emotion research in HCI grew from an eccentric hobby of some visionary scientists to a widely accepted field of research. A number of proof-of-concept prototypes and studies have been published, dedicated sensor systems and technology frameworks have been developed, and theoretical considerations have been made. While they all represent a very valuable contribution to this young field of research, they lack a common theoretical basis. Particularly, there exists no applicable model of emotions suitable for designing emotion-aware systems or performing HCI-related emotion studies. However, in order to become a mature discipline, emotion research in HCI needs such a rigorous footing that future work can be based on. In this paper, a suitable approach to structure and represent emotions for use in digital systems is introduced, after a detailed and critical review of widely used emotion models is given and representative study results are discussed. The proposed method meets several requirements of HCI researchers and software developers. It avoids artificial categorisation of emotions, requires no naming of emotional states, is language independent, and its implementation is straightforward. The results of an experiment based on this approach are discussed demonstrating its applicability.     

Feminist HCI meets facebook: Performativity and social networking sites

In this paper, I reflect on a specific product of interaction design, social networking sites. The goals of this paper are twofold. One is to bring a feminist reflexivity, to HCI, drawing on the work of Judith Butler and her concepts of peformativity, citationality, and interpellation. Her approach is, I argue, highly relevant to issues of identity and self-representation on social networking sites; and to the co-constitution of the subject and technology. A critical, feminist HCI must ask how social media and other HCI institutions, practices, and discourses are part of the processes by which sociotechnical configurations are constructed. My second goal is to examine the implications of such an approach by applying it to social networking sites (SNSs) drawing the empirical research literature on SNSs, to show how SNS structures and policies help shape the subject and hide the contingency of subject categories.     

Survey steered design: evaluating user recovery and command reuse support by questionnaire

Evaluation steered design is an important planning strategy in the construction of human-computer interfaces (HCI) and survey-based evaluation is one of the five main evaluation techniques available for use with this strategy. This paper reports on a survey-based evaluation by questionnaire that aims at investigating the serviceability and services required for user recovery and command 'reuse support. It discusses how to choose an evaluation method in an evaluation steered design process, analyses the problems of evaluation by survey, describes the methodology of conducting a mail questionnaire, reports on the detailed results of this investigation and provides refinement to the mail questionnaire as a valuable evaluation method in HCI research. It also proposes topics for further research in this area.     

A Review of Web‐Based Dietary Interventions: From the Human–Computer Interaction Practitioners' Perspective

Despite the popularity of web‐based dietary interventions, there are few evidence‐based, practical guidelines that help human–computer interaction (HCI) practitioners design new dietary intervention systems. We suspect that a lack of such guidelines is partly due to a chasm between two major research domains, healthcare and HCI. We believe that technologies developed in HCI are not used and evaluated by healthcare researchers, so we fail to accumulate experiences to develop guidelines. To assess the gap, we carefully selected 86 papers that employed and evaluated various web‐based dietary interventions in both fields and analyzed general characteristics, behavior change strategies, intervention media, and research outcomes used in each paper. Through this review, we reaffirmed our belief about the discrepancies between healthcare and HCI, and additional findings helped us offer some suggestions to close the gap. We also identified several interesting patterns among behavior change strategies, intervention media, and outcomes that provide potential topics for future research. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

运输态势交互模型及其CSP形式化研究

人机交互（HCI）技术的迅猛发展为自然高效和谐的HCI提供了基础支持,随着HCI行为的日益复杂,如何验证其过程的正确性成为研究HCI领域的重心。根据双手触摸光感应触控平台在运输态势的HCI,提出一种体现用户操作与设备响应相结合的运输态势HCI模型,该模型采用通信顺序进程形式化描述,并结合甘特图验证其单用户操作的逻辑正确性和稳定性。     

The Usability Construct: A Dead End?

“Usability” is a construct conceived by the human–computer interaction (HCI) community to denote a desired quality of interactive systems and products. Despite its prominence and intensive use in HCI research, the usefulness of the usability construct to HCI theories and to our understanding of HCI has been meager. In this article I propose and discuss two reasons for this state of affairs. The first is that usability is an umbrella construct. Umbrella constructs are prevalent in scientific fields that are broad, diverse, and lack a unifying research paradigm. Accordingly, umbrella constructs, such as usability, tend to be vague and loose, characteristics that challenge our ability to accumulate and communicate knowledge and to capture real-world phenomena. The second reason involves the nature of the relations between the usability construct and its measures, a topic rarely discussed in HCI research. There appears to be a mismatch between how the HCI community has (implicitly) conceptualized these relations and how it has empirically examined them. The relations have been conceptualized according to a formative measurement model but have mostly been tested according to a reflective measurement model. The trouble is that representing the usability construct by the reflective model appears inappropriate, and representing it by the formative model involves considerable difficulties. Possible ways of addressing these issues are discussed, each with its advantages and drawbacks. I conclude that for scientific research on this subject to progress, the usability construct ought to be unbundled and replaced by well-defined constructs. The issues discussed in this article are relevant to other HCI umbrella concepts and constructs such as user experience.     

Survey steered design: evaluating user recovery and command reuse support by questionnaire

Abstract

Abstract Evaluation steered design is an important planning strategy in the construction of human-computer interfaces (HCI) and survey-based evaluation is one of the five main evaluation techniques available for use with this strategy. This paper reports on a survey-based evaluation by questionnaire that aims at investigating the serviceability and services required for user recovery and command 'reuse support. It discusses how to choose an evaluation method in an evaluation steered design process, analyses the problems of evaluation by survey, describes the methodology of conducting a mail questionnaire, reports on the detailed results of this investigation and provides refinement to the mail questionnaire as a valuable evaluation method in HCI research. It also proposes topics for further research in this area.     

Structures,forms, and stuff: the materiality and medium of interaction

Though information is popularly, and often academically, understood to be immaterial, nonetheless, we only encounter it in material forms, in books, on laptops, in our brains, in spoken language, and so forth. In the past decade, HCI has increasingly focused on the material dimensions of interacting with computational devices and information. This paper explores three major strands of this research—tangible user interfaces, theories of computational materiality, and craft-oriented approaches to HCI. We argue that each of these offers a formulation of the materiality of interaction: as physical, as metaphysical, or as tradition communicating. We situate these three formulations in relation to debates on the nature of media, from philosophical aesthetics (the ontology of art, in particular), media studies, and visual cultural studies. We argue that the formulations of materiality, information, and meaning from HCI and those from the humanities have deeper underlying similarities than may be expected and that exploring these similarities have two significant benefits. Such an analysis can benefit these differing threads in different ways, taking their current theories and adding to them. It also serves as a basis to import philosophical art concepts in a robust way into HCI, that is, not simply as prepackaged ideas to be applied to HCI, but rather as ideas always already enmeshed in productive and living debates that HCI is now poised to enter—to the benefit of both HCI and the humanities.     

Playing stupid, caring for users, and putting on a good show: Feminist acts in usability study work

As a feminist HCI agenda develops, feminist analyses of behaviour must venture beyond the dominant liberal feminist approach to include other feminist approaches. Using the personal narrative or auto-ethnographic method, this article explores the role of gender in usability work, a common research practice in HCI. In this article, the author interprets three gendered behaviours that occur in usability work - playing stupid, caring for and about users, and putting on a good show - demonstrating that while these behaviours appear anti-feminist in a liberal feminist framework, they appear feminist in alternative feminist frameworks, such as relational/care-giving, sex-positive, multicultural, post-colonial and Third Wave. The article demonstrates how a feminist HCI agenda that embraces the multiplicity of feminisms necessarily forces a re-examination of usability work’s relationship to both feminism and HCI research methods.     

The need for a new experimental environment for HCI research into multi-agent, real-time systems

Much of the current research in HCI is carried out using experimental environments based on word processors, database search, or other conventional office automation. While this approach meets many needs it lacks the power required for investigating many unconventional situations. Complex multi-agent real-time systems are not typically found in offices and cannot easily be investigated in typical word processing or office automation contexts. The paper refers to four environments where multi-agency exists in a real-time environment: flight systems, plant control, telephone networks, and complex office systems. Consideration is given to the requirements of an alternative experimental environment which could allow HCI research to explore a wider range of issues.     

Human–computer interaction,foundations and new paradigms

This paper explores the roots of human–computer interaction as a discipline, the various trends which have marked its development, and some of the current and future challenges for research. Human–computer interaction, like any vocational discipline, sits upon three broad foundations: theoretical principles, professional practice and a community of people. As an interdisciplinary field the theoretical roots of HCI encompass a number of other disciplines including psychology, computing, ergonomics, and social sciences; however, it also has theoretical and practical challenges of its own. The evolving internal and external context of HCI, computers, have become smaller and less costly; this has led to changes in nature of the users and uses of computers, with corresponding impact on society. The paper explores the current challenges of computers from the cloud to digital fabrication and the need to design for solitude. It suggests that HCI should not just react to the changes around it, but also shape those changes.     

Towards the development of classes of interaction: initial illustration with reference to off-load planning

In recent years, a number of difficulties in designing interactions between military personnel and their command and control systems have been identified. These difficulties have been attributed to a lack of carry forward between procurement projects. This paper suggests that lack of carry forward is an integral part of current 'case by case' approaches to HCI. Consequently, a fundamentally different approach to HCI is required. The approach suggested here is a class approach. A class approach to HCI makes classinstance relationships between knowledge representations explicit by organising knowledge representations into class hierarchies. Given such hierarchies, procurement projects may consider the relevance of existing knowledge by attempting to locate the problem at hand within the hierarchy. Thus, a class approach to HCI may encourage carry forward by providing: (a) the opportunity to develop multiple instances of classes of interaction by specialising and instantiating class knowledge representations for the instances at hand; (b) the opportunity to apply research knowledge at different levels of development-to the development of the class and the instance (not just the case); and (c) an additional means of reasoning about the completeness/selectivity of instance knowledge representationswith respect to relevant, super-ordinate representations. This paper presents an initial illustration of a class approach to HCI. It identifies some key characteristics of a class approach to HCI, and then presents research and development work which exhibits these characteristics. Such an illustration is required, because current understanding about the nature of HCI concerns, and the relationships between HCI knowledge, practices and problems is such that one may not assume that all desirable approaches to HCI are necessarily realisable. Successful initial illustration provides an additional, encouraging precedent for full development of the approach.     

Intelligent interaction design: the role of human-computer interaction research in the design of intelligent systems

As more intelligent systems are introduced into the marketplace, it is becoming increasingly urgent to consider usability for such systems. Historically, the two fields of artificial intelligence (AI) and human- computer interaction (HCI) have had little in common. In this paper, we consider how established HCI techniques can usefully be applied to the design and evaluation of intelligent systems, and where there is an urgent need for new approaches. Some techniques - notably those for requirements acquisition and empirical evaluation - can usefully be adopted, and indeed are, within many projects. However, many of the tools and techniques developed within HCI to support design and theory-based evaluation cannot be applied in their present forms to intelligent systems because they are based on inappropriate assumptions; there is consequently a need for new approaches. Conversely, there are approaches that have been developed within AI - e.g. in research on dialogue and on ontologies - that could usefully be adapted and encapsulated to respond to this need. These should form the core of a future research agenda for intelligent interaction design.