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HCI Word of the Day Archive

Day Person, Place, or Concept Description
6/02 Vannevar Bush American engineer (1890-1974) known for his work on analog computing. He was the author of “As We May Think” giving birth to the idea of the memex, which was seen decades later as a pioneering concept for the World Wide Web.
6/03 PARC Palo Alto Research Center, Inc. was founded in 1970. It has been the incubator of many innovations in modern computing – the mouse, graphical user interface, WYSIWYG, Ethernet, object-oriented programming, and ubiquitous computing.
6/04 Contextual Design A user-centered design process developed by Hugh Beyer and Karen Holtzblatt. It incorporates ethnographic methods for gathering data relevant to the product, field studies, rationalizing workflows, system and designing human-computer interfaces.
6/05 HCI Human-computer interaction is a discipline concerned with the design, evaluation and implementation of interactive computing systems for human use and with the study of major phenomena surrounding them.
6/06 Ben Shneiderman Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Maryland at College Park. He is the author of Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction. Since 1991 his major focus has been information visualization.
6/07 Web Accessibility Means that people with disabilities can perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with the Web, and that they can contribute to the Web. Web accessibility also benefits others, including older people with changing abilities due to aging.
6/08 Heuristic Evaluation A popular usability inspection method. The goal of heuristic evaluation is to find the usability problems in the design so that they can be attended to as part of an iterative design process. Heuristic evaluation involves having a small set of evaluators examine the interface and judge its compliance with recognized usability principles (the "heuristics").
6/09 Usability A term used to denote the ease with which people can employ a particular tool or other human-made object in order to achieve a particular goal.
6/10 Jakob Nielsen A leading web usability consultant. He holds a Ph.D. in human-computer interaction from the Technical University of Denmark in Copenhagen. Read more about Nielsen at Useit.com
6/11 Donald Norman A professor emeritus of cognitive science at University of California, San Diego and a Professor of Computer Science at Northwestern University. In his book The Design of Everyday Things, originally called "The Psychology of Everyday Things," Norman describes the psychology behind what he deems 'good' and 'bad' design, through case studies, and proposes design principles.
6/12 Paper Prototyping A widely used method in the user-centered design process. Representative users perform realistic tasks by interacting with a paper version of the interface that is manipulated by a person ‘playing computer,’ who doesn’t explain how the interface is intended to work. Watch the video if you want to see it in action.
6/13 Personas Fictitious characters that are created to represent the different user types within a targeted demographic that might use a site or product. Personas were popularized by Alan Cooper in his 1999 book 'The Inmates are Running the Asylum'.
6/14 Fitts' Law A model of human psychomotor behavior developed in 1954. The model is based on time and distance. It enables the prediction of human movement and human motion based on rapid, aimed movement. Try out the Fitts' Law demo.
6/15 Task Analysis How a task is accomplished, including a detailed description of both manual and mental activities, task and element durations, task frequency, task allocation, task complexity, environmental conditions, necessary clothing and equipment, and any other unique factors involved in or required for one or more people to perform a given task. Here's a task analysis of brushing your teeth.
6/16 User Experience Design IBM says it encompasses traditional Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) design and extends it by addressing all aspects of a product or service as perceived by users. And you all know I like pictures, so here's a graphic depicting some of the elements of the user experience.
6/17 Affordance The quality of an object, or an environment, that allows an individual to perform an action. In The Psychology of Everyday Things, Donald Norman appropriated the term to refer not only to the physical capabilities of the actor, but also to their goals, plans, values, beliefs and past experience. If this still doesn't make sense, see the armchair and softball example on Wikipedia.
6/18 Think-aloud technique Also called the Think aloud protocol is a method used to gather data in usability testing. The technique involves participants thinking aloud as they are performing a set of specified tasks. Users are asked to say whatever they are looking at, thinking, doing, and feeling, as they go about their task.
6/19 GOMS An approach to HCI observation which stands for Goals, Operators, Methods, and Selection rules. It was developed in 1983 by Stuart Card, Thomas P. Moran and Allen Newell, and spelled out in their book The Psychology of Human Computer Interaction.
6/20 InfoVis Information Visualization (InfoVis) is the communication of abstract data through the use of interactive visual interfaces. A notable person in the field is Edward Tufte. See the Periodic table of visualization methods for a sampling of ways to display data. Try out ManyEyes, a public Web site where you can upload data and create interactive visualizations.
6/21 Web 2.0 A term describing the trend in the use of World Wide Web technology and web design that aims to enhance creativity, information sharing, and, most notably, collaboration among users (e.g. web-based communities and hosted services, such as social-networking sites, wikis, and blogs).
6/25 Quiz 10 - Question, short answer quiz over HCI words of the day in class on Wednesday
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Topic revision: r9 - 2008-06-25 - 18:43:39 - JaneaTriplett
 
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