The icon
signifies the book "Human-Computer Interaction"and
gives the pages (for 2nd edition) that cover much of the material you should
know. The fine details are not critical - the general principles are. Note that
the 3rd edition is out, and you can use either.
Work marked Essential here covers material that you ideally should read: if it's discussed in the lecture then this provides decent background information for you and provides you with resources to make decent notes. The Relevant and Interesting stuff contains alternative presentations and some further interesting stuff, which will increase your knowledge of the relevant subject.
Essential |
Relevant and interesting |
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Introduction. HCI - why, what and who? Chapter 1. The Human
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Exercises to understand more about short-term memory, to be done in groups | ||
| Human memory | Discussion of the three different types of memory | Visual perception illusions and effects |
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| How people think: reasoning and problem solving | Unreliable eyes! |
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| Exercise: memory exercises and theory | Short term memory exercises to see what affects your memory | Memory c.f. RAM |
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"Re: Is human memory similar to to the ram in a pc?
Message: Human memory is now thought to be a large number of separate systems. You may be familiar with terms such as long-term memory, a hypothesized memory system that holds facts like your current phone number and mother's maiden name. There are plenty of others: the auditory loop which stores recently perceived sounds, the visual-spatial sketchpad for "mental imagery," muscle memory, etc.. The brief answer to your question is that some of these memory systems clearly require maintenance. For other memory systems, especially those storing the most stable long term memories, no one knows."
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| Human senses |
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Brief look at human senses and their capabilities |
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| Brain as a computer |
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"The view that the brain can be seen as a type of computer has gained general acceptance in the philosophical and computer science community. Just as we ask how many mips or megaflops an IBM PC or a Cray can perform, we can ask how many operations the human brain can perform..." | ||||
| All you need to know about colour |
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Needs flash, but is excellent | ||||
| Memory |
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"just as we can ask how many megabytes of RAM a PC has we should be able to ask how many megabytes (or gigabytes, or terabytes, or whatever) of memory the human brain has..."
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Essential |
Relevant and interesting |
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| Psychology, People, and HCI | Norman, D. (1988). The psychology of everyday things. (multiple copies in campus libraries) This book is worth reading all the way through, but it is also quite easy to dip into for some examples of design principles that relate to psychology. Chapters 1-4 cover the concepts introduced in the People lecture, namely affordances, constraints, mappings, mental models, and metaphors.
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Affordances and Design |
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Online essay from Don Norman about affordances and design. | ||
Can computers have "personalities"? What happens when you talk to someone using a low-quality video link? |
Reeves, B. & Nass, C. (1996)The media equation - How people treat computers, television, and new media like real people and places. (only 1 copy I'm afraid, but it should be on its way to shortloan) This book features a number of interesting examples of how people can react in unexpected ways to technology, especially with regard to viewing computers as having personalities and some subtle effects of technology mediated communication such as videophones. You don't have to read the whole book - it's nicely divided into sections so just dip in and pick the bits you find interesting.
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Mental
Models on the web
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Nice site about mental models - what are they, what are they for etc. | ||
Tech Support Funnies |
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How many of these funny stories are the result of the user having a misconceived notion of what is going on inside their computer? These stories might be funny, but whose fault is it that they have these weird ideas? Could the design be improved to make sure people have a better understanding of what's going on? | ||||
| Lecture slides | ||||||
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Chapter 2. The computer main principles |
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| HowStuffWorks: keyboards, mice, monitors |   |
epinions on input devices |
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| A brief history of interaction devices |
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Brad Myer's (now out of date) potted history of HCI technology |
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Directory of input devices - more than you could possibly want to know about
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| Microsoft's research thoughts |
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"We’re working on devices which will allow you to use novel forms of input, such as a gesture, a wink, a voice command, or a pen. We’re also exploring new ways to use the keyboard..." | ||||
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Relevant and interesting |
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Section 3.4 Ergonomics Section 3.5 - end chapter. Interaction styles |
Moving on from WIMP |
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IBM's Real Things interface ideas
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Chapter 10. Implementation support Skim this to get an idea of how WIMP and other systems are actually built |
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Relevant and interesting |
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Chapter 11. Evaluation. |
Understanding the statistics, if you can do maths, helps you appreciate things more fully
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| Heuristic evaluation | "Heuristic evaluation is the most popular of the usability inspection methods. Heuristic evaluation is done as a systematic inspection of a user interface design for usability. 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")." | Web-based questionnaires |
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"administer and collect data according to a few "standard" user interface evaluation questionnaire forms" includes information on standard metrics |
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| Cognitive Walkthrough | Gregory Abowd's summary of this technique | Exercise - cognitive walkthrough |
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A cognitive walkthrough evaluation task on a given system, complete with other groups findings. | ||
| Usability testing methods | ||||||
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Relevant and interesting |
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| The Cranky User | "Everything I need to know about usability, I learned at the arcade" | Introduction to Usability |
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Onepage introduction to usability
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| Nielsen's Usability Heuristics | 10 Usability Heuristics | Website Design |
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Longer article on website design, from beginning to end | ||
| Usability |
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MIT's take on usability - a brief set of slides
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| Homepage usability |
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That Nielsen man again... | ||||
Essential |
Relevant and interesting |
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| IBM design principles | "The design principles presented here combine traditional wisdom with extensions to address the evolution of future interfaces. Existing design principles are based on our own experiences in user interface design, on the design experiences of others, and on insights from linguistics and psychology. We have extended these design principles to address evolving interfaces that will provide a more friendly appearance and behavior in the future. The increasing use of 3-D and real-world representations as well as the blossoming popularity of the Internet and the World Wide Web have strongly influenced these progressions. "
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Design guide for educational software |
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"Our aim is to improve the quality
of educational software by providing some general principles and Ease of use can be split into three aspects: usability (can people use the software effectively andefficiently to perform a task?), usefulness (does it improve teaching and learning?) and desirability (do people enjoy using it?). This guide is primarily about usability."
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| Human Interface design principles | "This section provides a theoretical base....[and]
covers: Metaphors See-and-Point Direct Manipulation User Control Feedback and Communication Consistency WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) Forgiveness Perceived Stability Aesthetic Integrity Modelessness" |
Web design and usability guidelines |
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| Psychology of Everyday Things | Chapter 5: Designing for Error. Don't worry about the Models of Human Thought section though. This Chapter should be read in combination with the other relevant sections in this book, ie Chapters 1-4 that cover the principles introduced in the People lecture.
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Java look and feel design guidelines |
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 comprehensive
guidelines for Java |
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| Toilet rolls |
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Apple OS X design guidelines |
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| Remote control gets better |  and
again... |
Denim - informal interface design tool |
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Read about it or even play with it..... |
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| Lecture slides | ||||||
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Relevant and interesting |
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| Homepage usability | That Nielsen man again...
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Web pages that suck |
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| Style Guide | How to create decent web pages. You may not agree with all of this, but the main points are concisely and clearly presented. | Top 10 mistakes in web page design |
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Jakob Neilsen's view... | ||
| Review of web style guides | "we review several of these on-line style guides, and offer our interpretation of the logic of the guidelines. We find that sometimes the web style guides make quite similar recommendations for developing a web site, sometimes they disagree, and sometimes they emphasize different design considerations" | How users read on the web |
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This will help you write better web pages | ||
| Writing for the web |
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Sun's view (but check out the authors) | ||||
| Web page design for designers |
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Some interesting information, but is it all good web design? | ||||
| Web Style Guide |
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The online version of the book of the same name. Good, but lots of it. Pick and chose relevant parts...
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Relevant and interesting |
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| Excel mode error | Alan Dix's study of a problem in Excel | User-centred design case study |
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"This case study describes our approach when we were commissioned by an international software company to design a front-end to their relational database system. " | ||
| London Ambulance Service | A classic case study. This page provides a summary, and there's a reference at the end to a relevant book that covers this case and others in detail. | |||||
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Relevant and interesting |
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| Broadband - how and why is it taken up? | Report from The Work Foundation |
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All of the following are suggestions of places to look for info on what is currently going on in the world of technology. Not all of the stories you will find are relevant to the theme of technology in everyday life, but they are provided simply as a jumping off point for your own reading. | |||
| Harrow Technology
Report
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You'll find lots of interesting articles on these sites relating to how we use technology in everyday life (and more besides...) | |||||
| Smart Mobs | Howard Rheingold's latest book - an excellent read, and highly recommended for anyone interested in this area. | |||||
| ACM Technews |
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| The Register | ||||||
| Slashdot |
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Essential |
Relevant and interesting |
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| Jakob Nielsen's views on mobile usability
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Case study: mobile device design for specialised application |
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University of Washington's students use human-centred design approaches for a very unusual system...
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| Human-Centred design for the mobile market | Donald Norman airs his views on what HCD is and why it's relevant to mobile devices
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| IBM's user-centered design | What it is, the main principles, and the process | |||||
| One generation from useful | Jakob Nielsen talks about how he thinks mobile devices & services are still one generation from useful. | Why are mobile phones annoying? |
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AlertBox article summarising research into why it's annoying to hear other people conversations on mobiles. | ||
| Default Thinking | This paper discusses the concept of 'default thinking' and talks about why mobile services are not designed the way they should be.
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Grabbable interfaces |
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Interfaces that used a hybrid approach of information in the world, and an interface on a mobile phone. Could be the next big thing...
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| Lecture slides | ||||||
| What is HCI |
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Introductory web of information summarising what HCI is about
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| IBM Ease of Use site |
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A wealth of relevant information on design, usability and so on
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| HCI book resource list |
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Links to general HCI resources
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| Napier's HCI resources |
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DAF
S!
For many of the topics, there are a huge number of resources - typing relevant terms into Google and choosing quality sites (.ac, .edu in particular, especially if related to coursework) are likely to give you a lot of insight into the issues.
Don
Norman's off again.....