Lecture 1 -- Intro and History
Readings: DTUI ch 1
I. Intro to CS 3724
Who are these people?
- Who is Scott McCrickard?
Scott is a second-year assistant professor in the Computer Science Department.
Check out his Web page
to learn more about him. The best way to get in touch with Scott
is via email at mccricks@cs.vt.edu.
- Who is Peter Schoenhoff?
Peter is a Masters student in the Computer Science Department.
Check out his Web page
for more information about him.
His email address is pschoen@cs.vt.edu.
Textbooks
- Who is Ben Shneiderman?
Shneiderman is a CS Professor and the head of the HCIL
at the University of Maryland. Check out his
Web page
for more info about him and his work.
- What is Designing the User Interface?
This book covers many topics in Human Factors in Computing Systems
and provides nice pictures, summaries, and tables.
There is a Web page
associated with the book.
- Who is Don Norman?
Don Norman is a psychology researcher and a graduate of
MIT and Penn. He has worked at Harvard, UCSD, and Apple,
and currently is part of the Nielsen Norman Group.
Check out his
Web site for more information.
- What is The Design of Everyday Things?
DOET looks at poor designs that confound us in everyday life
and examines how we can avoid them in our own designs.
Resources
- Email is the best way to contact Scott (mccricks@cs.vt.edu)
and Pete (pschoen@cs.vt.edu).
- The newsgroup is best for questions and comments of general
interest. You should subscribe to the newsgroup and read it almost
every day, especially as exams and other deadlines approach.
The newsgroup is vatech.class.cs3724
- The Web page contains lecture outlines, assignments,
and related materials. It will be updated throughout the quarter.
The URL is http://courses.cs.vt.edu/~cs3724/fall2001/
Evaluation
You will be evaluated based on a group project (30%),
several homeworks (20% total), a midterm (15%),
a final (25%), and class participation (10%).
Watch the news group and Web page for details about each of these.
II. Intro to CS 3724
What is HCI?
Goals of UI design.
- 5 measurable factors from book plus one more:
- Time to learn
- Speed of performance
- Error rate
- Retention over time
- Subjective satisfaction
- Cost
- Motivations
- Life-critical
- Industrial/commercial
- Office/home
- Exploratory
- Human diversity
- Understand ranges for height, reach, sight, touch, hearing, etc
- Know limitations in memory, attention span, fear, age, etc
- Watch for cultural differences with respect to characters, date/time
format, weights, phone numbers, colors, etiquette
- Goals
- Scientific method
- Change computer consciousness -- get mad about interface problems!
III. History of HCI
Here are some important events, topics, and systems.
MEMEX, hypertext, indexing
J.C.R. Licklider Man-computer symbiosis
brain+machine, speech and character recognition
Ivan Sutherland Sketchpad
hierarchies, OO Design, constraints, icons
Douglas Engelbart
mouse, windows, shared file system, hypertext
XEROX PARC ALTO and STAR
windows, menus, scrollbars, pointing, consistency
Apple LISA and Mac
cheap, high-quality graphics, "the computer for the rest of us"
Alternatives
What will be the next "big thing" to replace the desktop interface,
at least for certain applications?
IV. HCI at Virginia Tech
Scott McCrickard, Doug Bowman, Chris North, Manuel Perez
John Carroll, Mary Beth Rosson, Rex Hartson, Deborah Hix
Others in Industrial and Systems Engineering, Psychology, etc.