Urban HCI myths
Lyn Bartram
Proud Purveyor of HCI Truth
Myth 1. HCI is just about the user
interface to my application
• 1a. And “user interface” is just look-and-feel with some
marketing added..
• Interface: the place at which and means by which
independent and often unrelated systems meet, act on and
communicate with each other
--Webster’s Dictionary
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Myth 1. HCI is just about the user
interface to my application?
• The Systems Design view
• “the scientific discipline concerned with the
understanding of interactions between humans and
other elements of a system”
• The Communications View
• “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.”
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Myth 1a. Well then, HCI is just about
usability?
• Usability means optimising the design of an artifact or a
technology to solve a problem
• Making a better hammmer for your nails
• Doesn’t help the dry -my-hair problem
• Problem definition, Design, Implementation,
Deployment and effects of technology
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Myth 2. HCI problems are easily defined
• Limited by perspective
• The blind men and the elephant
• The ABM UI
• The CSS complaints path
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Myth 3. Only engineers and computer
types need to care about HCI
• From the systems design viewpoint again:
• Understand interactions
• From the communications viewpoint again:
• Optimise communications
• We can leverage a lot from human-human interactions
• Arguably engineers, computer scientists and other
geeks aren’t necessarily good at same
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Myth 3. Only engineers and computer
types need to care about HCI ?
• Ergonomics (human factors)
• Visualisation
• Interaction (hardware , software, motor skills, …)
• Information structure and retrieval
• CSCW (computer-mediated collaboration)
• Ethnography (how people use tools)
• Cognitive and perceptual psychology
• Operating systems
• Security
• ……
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Myth 4. HCI is design (art) not science
• Large empirical body of research
• Human factors, perception and other reproducible
experimentally robust results
…BUT…
• Difficult to study humans in ecologically valid ways
• Complexity breeds interpretative and qualitative
research that is difficult to generalise
….BUT …
• Still increasing body of knowledge about how systems
interact
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Myth 5. HCI is science and not design or
art
• Designers are trained in communication and expression
• Quantification does not imply understanding
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Myth 6. The user always knows what
she wants
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User reporting is notoriously inaccurate
•
Actually the user mostly knows what she doesn’t
want as soon as you show it to her
•
HCI design is most often an iterative process of being
wrong
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Myth 6a. The more expert the user, the
better she knows what she wants
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•
Eliciting expert knowledge is incredibly difficult
•
Expert knowledge is the easiest to misconstrue and
mishandle
•
Wrong problem specification
•
Wrong solution direction
•
Non-invasive, non-disruptive informative observation
is an oxymoron
•
Expert users are expensive in effort and time
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Myth 7. What the user wants is what the
user needs
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•
Individual preferences often fly in the face of
performance results
•
Explicit articulation does not map to implicit rules and
knowledge
•
Balance between efficiency, affection and hatred
•
Empirical research informs hard decisions
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Myth 8. HCI Design and deployment
should be left to experts
• Who’s an expert???
• Participatory design provides guidance and enlists
“owners”
• Autonomy, influence, flexibility and freedom are as
important in human-computer interaction as they are in
human-human interactions
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Myth 9. HCI is deterministic – there is
eventually always a right answer
• Set of tradeoffs factoring in environmental,
cognitive, cost and capacity constraints
• Often a choice of the best of unsatisfactory
options
• A moving target – once encountered – there is
always something better
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Myth 10. HCI is easy
NOT!
• The hard sciences are …math, chemistry,
physics, …
• The soft sciences are the most difficult because
they study the most complex system (humans)
• HCI attempts to cover the meeting of the two
• 78-90% of dev costs relate to HCI
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