HCI History

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Whig History:• History of the winners (today’s perspective)• Inevitable technological progressInternalist History of Technology• Sole focus on the technology rather than social

forces shaping and shaped by the technologyTechnological determinism:• Technology determines history

or• Progress is driven by technical innovation that

follows an inevitable path

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Note on HistoriographyNote on Historiography

Brad Meyers

• Meyers, B. A. (1998). A Brief History of Human Computer Interaction Technology.

• ACM Interactions, 5(2), 44-54.

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The usual suspectsThe usual suspects

• WIMP Interfaces (GUI)– Windows, Icons, Mouse, Pointing– Direct Manipulation– Metaphors

• Hypertext / WWW• Person-to-person computing– Communication– Collaboration CSCW– Instruction

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What is missing??

“Internalist” history focuses on the functionality and development of technology but lacks recognition of the social and political context that shapes and is shaped by the technologies– University research– Market and Industry R&D– Political forces

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The technologies

• But let’s look quickly at the key developments said to set the stage for the emergence of Human-Computer Interaction

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Innovator: Innovator: Ivan SutherlandIvan Sutherland

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• SketchPad - 1963 PhD thesis at MIT– Hierarchy - pictures & sub-pictures– Master picture with instances (i.e., OOP)– Icons– Copying– Light pen input device– Recursive operations

The Ubiquitous ASR 33 Teletype

• ASR: Automatic Send / Receive• Store programs on punched paper

tape• The first direct human-computer

interface experience for many in the 1960s

• About 10 characters per second - 110 bps

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The Ubiquitous Glass Teletype

• 24 x 80 characters• Up to 19,200 bps– BPS?– Bits per second

Source: http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/vt100.html

About Doug Engelbart• Invented the mouse

• 1962 Paper "Conceptual Model for Augmenting Human Intellect"

– Complexity of problems increasing– Need better ways of solving problems

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Picture from www.bootstrap.o

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Augmenting Human IntellectAugmenting Human Intellect

• Advantages of chord keyboards?

• Disadvantages?

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Jason Hong / James Landay, UC Berkeley, http://sloan.stanford.edu/MouseSite/MouseSitePg1.html

Augmenting Human Intellect

“At SRI in the 1960s we did some experimenting with a foot mouse. I found that it was workable, but my control wasn't very fine and my leg tended to cramp from the unusual posture and task.”

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http://sloan.stanford.edu/MouseSite/MouseSitePg1.html

Augmenting Human Intellect

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ChordedKeyboard

Early3-buttonmouse

Augmenting Human IntellectAugmenting Human Intellect

• First mouse• First hypertext• First word processing• First 2D editing and

windows• First document

version control

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• First groupware (shared screen teleconferencing)

• First context-sensitive help

• First distributed client-server

• Many, many more!

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Early Personal Computers

• 1975 IBM 5100

• 1977 Radio ShackTRS-80

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Early Personal ComputersEarly Personal Computers

• 1997 Apple II

• 1979 VisiCalc - “killer app”for Apple II

• 1981 IBM XT/AT

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The dawn of the PC & GUI The dawn of the PC & GUI Xerox PARC

• Palo Alto Research Center (PARC)• Established 1970– Bob Taylor heads CSL - Computer Systems Lab

• Goal: “The Paperless Office”– Are we there yet?

• “Inventing the future”– Researchers using their new creations as their own

tools - bootstrapping

Side note: “invent the future”“Don’t worry about what anybody else is going to do. The best way

to predict the future is to invent it. Really smart people with reasonable funding can do just about anything that doesn’t violate too many of Newton’s Laws!”

Is the Best Way to Predict the Future to Invent It? Or to Prevent It? – Title of Alan Kay.s Keynote Address for CHI 98: April 18-23, 1998, Los Angeles, CA USA.

Alan Kay, in an email on Sept 17, 1998 to Peter W. LountThe origin of the quote came from an early meeting in 1971 of PARC, Palo Alto

Research Center, folks and the Xerox planners. In a fit of passion I uttered the quote! http://www.smalltalk.org/alankay.html

I said that to the Xerox planners back in 1971. They were worrying about what the rest of the world was going to do and the statement was made to get them to understand that as long as we had some top technologists, we didn’t have to worry about what anybody else was going to do -- we could just do it ourselves. And we did. http://www.convergemag.com/Publications/CNVGSept99/IN%20CLOSE/INCLOSE/InClose.shtm

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Alan KayAlan Kay• Dynabook - Notebook sized computer loaded with

multimedia and can store everything• Personal computing• Desktop interface• Overlapping windows

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PARC Hardware PARC Hardware Milestones Milestones

• Laser printer 1971• Alto personal computer 1973• 808 x 606 raster bitmapped display• 3-button mouse, keyboard• Ethernet 1973• Merges printing, display and networking• Real-time windowing operations (BitBlt) 1973

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PARC Software Milestones

• Bravo WYSIWYG text editor/formatter 1974• Gypsy text editor with GUI and modeless

cut and paste editing 1975• Draw drawing program 1975• Superpaint paint program 1974-75

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Xerox Star - 1981Xerox Star - 1981• First commercial PC designed for “business

professionals”– desktop metaphor– pointing– WYSIWYG– high degree of consistency and simplicity

• First system based on formal usability engineering– Paper prototyping and analysis– Usability testing and iterative refinement

Xerox Star DesktopXerox Star Desktop

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Xerox Star - 1981Xerox Star - 1981

Commercial flop• $15k cost• closed architecture• lacking key functionality

(spreadsheet)

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Apple Lisa - 1982Apple Lisa - 1982

• Based on ideas of Star

• More personal rather than office tool– Still $$$ - $10K to $12K

• Failure

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Apple Macintosh - 1984

• Aggressive pricing– $2500

• Good interface guidelines• Third party

applications• Great graphics,

laser printer

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Direct Manipulation

• ‘82 Shneiderman described appeal of rapidly-developing graphically-based interaction– object visibility– incremental action and rapid feedback– reversibility encourages exploration– replace language with action– syntactic correctness of all actions

• WYSIWYG, Apple Mac

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MetaphorMetaphor

• Use involves problem-solving or learning to some extent

• Relating computing to real-world activity is effective learning mechanism– File management on office desktop– Financial analysis as spreadsheets

• The tension between literalism & magic– Eject disk or CD on Mac by dragging to trash can

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Person-to-Person CommunicationsPerson-to-Person Communications

• Enabled by several technologies– Ethernet and TCP/IP protocol – Personal computer– Telephone network and modems

• And by killer-app software– Email, Instant Messaging, Chat, Bulletin Boards

• CSCW - conferencing, shared white boards• Not quite yet a killer-app

• Micro-sociological phenomenon are central to successes (and failures)

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CSCW

• Computer-Supported Cooperative Work• No longer single user/single system• Micro-social aspects are crucial• E-mail as prominent success but other

groupware still not widely used

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HypertextHypertext• Think of information not as linear flow but as

interconnected nodes• Bush’s MEMEX gave the idea in 1945• Nelson coined term in 1965• Engelbart’s NLS did it in 1965• WWW in ’93 was the real launch

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Speech / Agents

• Actions do not always speak louder than words

• Interface as mediator or agent• Language• How good does it need to be?– “Tricks”, vocabulary, domains

• How “human” do we want it to be?– (HAL, Bob, PaperClip)

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Ubiquitous Computing

• Person is no longer user of single device but occupant of computationally-rich environment

• "Ubiquitous computing names the third wave in computing, just now beginning. First were mainframes, each shared by lots of people. Now we are in the personal computing era, person and machine staring uneasily at each other across the desktop. Next comes ubiquitous computing, or the age of calm technology, when technology recedes into the background of our lives.” - Marki Weiser, circa 1988

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Dick Tracy ®&© 1999 Tribune Media

Services, Inc

Computing is Everywhere, ...

• From the desk-top to the set-top to the palm-top to the flip-top to the wrist-top…

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VR & 3D Interaction

• Create immersion by – Realistic appearance, interaction, behavior

• Draw on spatial memory, proprioception, kinesthesis, two-handed interaction

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Mobile Computing

• Devices used in a variety of contexts

• Employ sensors to understand how user is working with devices

• Wireless communication• PDAs, Cell Phones, GPSs,

etc etc etc

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Whig History:• History of the winners (today’s perspective)• Inevitable technological progressInternalist History of Technology• Sole focus on the technology rather than social

forces shaping and shaped by the technologyTechnological determinism:• Technology determines history

or• Progress is driven by technical innovation that

follows an inevitable path

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Note on HistoriographyNote on Historiography

What’s the point?

• What’s the point(s) of last discussion?• What’s the point(s) of Chapter 1 of ID?• What’s the connection?

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Study of THE USER THE USER (experience)(experience)

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Rather than the machine

The context of emergence of HCI

Why (when) did USERS become so important in computing?

• When did masses start using important computer systems?– Safety critical?– Aerospace

– Astronauts highly trained and very few, infrequent

– Pilots are MANY and frequent• Air Traffic controllers• Airline booking agents (distributed, complex,

big money)

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Consumers (entertainment)

– Gaming – Joystick, TV (Pong), Arcades (Pac Man)

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(Public) Education

The pocket calculator TI 30 (1977)

• Display is 8 digits, red LED.• Four function, memory, scientific functions.• Integrated circuit - Texas Instruments

TMC0981.

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Cold WarCold War

• Decentralization of communication and resources in case of nuclear attack– Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) 1960s– NSFNet (1980s)– Commercial

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HCI HCI The early field and scienceThe early field and science

• Early HCI emerged out of human factors engineering

• Focus on sensory-motor operations describing interactions of people and computers such as hand movement and similar physical behaviors.

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Fitts Law 1954Fitts Law 1954• Field of Experimental Psychology• Model of psychomotor behavior • Predicts how fast or accurate a human can aim

and move an appendage (like a hand) in a line from rest to a specified target some distance away.

• Fitts found that movement time (MT) was a logarithmic function of distance (A) for a given target size or width (W) and, similarly, movement time was a logarithmic function of target size for a given distance. The law is given by the equation below:

• MT = a + b log 2 (2 A/W) , where a and b are regression coefficients.

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Fitts Law applied to HCIFitts Law applied to HCI• By the late 1970s, early HCI researchers were

applying Fitts law to model human interactions with input mechanisms.

• Card, S. K., English, W. K., & Burr, B. J. (1978). Evaluation of Mouse, Rate-controlled Isometric Joystick, Step Keys, and Text Keys for Text Selection on a CRT. Ergonomics, 21, 601-613.

• Early use of Fitts to describe how well subjects could use input devices (joystick and mouse) to select text on a Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) display

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The Emerging Field of HCIThe Emerging Field of HCImid 1980s• HCI researchers had begun to

campaign for the acceptance as a legitimate “science”• complete with– research agenda – distinct methods and goals

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HCI as a “science”

Newell 1985• Plenary address of the major HCI conference

hosted by the Association for Computing Machinery, CHI ’85 Conference

• HCI model:Goals, Operators, Methods, and Selection (GOMS)– extended cognitive psychology orientations to

research on HCI

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Focus on usersFocus on users

PragmatismPragmatism is a better philosophical basis for understanding (and studying) HCI than the rationalismrationalism that guide conventional and traditional thinking.

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Naïve conventional modelof information flow (rationalist) Human-Computer Interaction

Information flows from person to computer, to person, and so on….

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From rationalism to pragmatismFrom rationalism to pragmatism• The rationalist attitudes concentrate on logic and

theory rather than attention to the needs of computer users.

• Understanding technology as it is situated in the organization of social activities

• Pragmatism: – knowledge and technology is socially situated.– Scientific theories and logic are tools used in a certain

social practice.– Interface I/O metaphors guide users

• Desktop, folders, menus,

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John Gould (1988) "How to Design Usable Systems"

• focus on the needs of users from the very start of the project.

• four simple principles: – early and continuous focus on users– early and continual testing – iterative design as result of testing– integrated design, all elements develop constantly

and in coordination

Interface as a commodityInterface as a commodity

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Project Teams

• Online Survey (for project teams)• Quick inventory for teaming.• Listserve email

DUE THIS Thursday

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