Professional Documents
Culture Documents
John M. Carroll
Cap. I del Libro Human-Computer Interaction in the New Millennium
The Emergence of Usability
Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) is the study and the practice of usability. It is about
understanding and creating software and other technology that people will want to use, will be able
to use, and will find effective when used. The concept of usability, and the methods and tools to
encourage it, achieve it, and measure it are now touchstones in the culture of computing.
Through the past two decades, HCI emerged as a focal area of both computer science research and
development and of applied social and behavioral science. Some of the reasons for its success are
straightforwardly technical: HCI evoked many difficult problems and elegant solutions in the recent
history of computingfor example, in work on direct manipulation interfaces, user interface
management systems, task-oriented help and instruction, and computer-supported collaborative
work. Other reasons are broadly cultural: The province of HCI is the view the nonspecialist public has
of computer and information technology and the impact that technology has on their lives in the
sense that it is the visible part of computer science and technology. The most recent reasons are
commercial: As the underlying technologies of computing become commodities, inscribed on generic
chips, the noncommodity value of computer products and services resides in applications and user
interfacesthat is, in HCI.
The beginning of HCI is sometimes traced to the March 1982 (U.S.) National Bureau of Standards
conference, "Human Factors in Computer Systems," though related conferences and workshops were
conducted throughout the world at about that time. It is surely true that after the Bureau of
Standards conference, HCI experienced meteoric growth. However, fourlargely independent
threads of technical development from the 1960s and 1970s provided the foundation that allowed
this interdisciplinary program to gel so rapidly in the early 1980s.
These four threads were prototyping and iterative development from software engineering; software
psychology and human factors of computing systems; user interface software from computer
graphics; and models, theories, and frameworks from cognitive science. It is interesting to remember
these four roots of HCI, since the concerns that evoked them and that brought them together are still
underlying forces in HCI today.
critical requirements often emerge during system development and cannot be anticipated. He
concluded that software designers should always "plan to throw one away."
This was a striking lesson and one that continues to inspire studies of design. Design is now seen as
opportunistic, concrete, and necessarily iterative. Designers typically work toward partial solutions for
subsets of requirements, using prototypes to evoke further requirements and, indeed, to reformulate
the goals and constraints of the problem. By providing techniques to quickly construct, evaluate, and
change partial solutions, prototyping has become a fulcrum for system development.
guidance would come from general principles of perception and motor activity, problem-solving and
language, communication and group behavior, and so on. It would also include developing a domain
theory, or theories, of HCI.
A prominent early example was the Goals, Operators, Methods, and Selection (GOMS) rules model
for analyzing routine human-computer interactions (Card, Moran, and Newell 1983). This was an
advance on prior human factors modeling, which did not address the cognitive structures underlying
manifest behavior. But it was also an advance on the cognitive psychology of the time: It explicitly
integrated many components of skilled performance to produce predictions about real tasks. The
GOMS model is important because it set a standard for scientific and theoretical rigor and innovation
that became a defining characteristic of HCI.
The foundations of HCI remain an active focus of research. The first group of papers in this volume
shows how these foundations are continuing to expand the disciplinary scope and relevance of HCI
models, theories, and frameworks to practitioners.
they perform a task. Theory-based models and tools took an even more ambitious position, seeking
to enable analytic evaluations of designs before they were implemented even as prototypes. Usability
engineering has remained a core concern of the ACM SIGCHI community, and its CHI Conference,
but subcommunities have also developed for usability methods (the Usability Professional's
Association) and for theory-based models (the Conference on User Modeling).
The objective of providing guidance earlier in the system development process entrained
fundamental changes in usability engineering. An example is the recognition that the earliest point
for impact is requirements analysis. The sociologists and anthropologists who had come to HCI
through its connection to cognitive science showed through field studies of work practices that people
do their work and use their tools in surprisingly creative ways (Suchman 1987). But their work
practices are often not easy to anticipate without direct study or direct user participation in the
development process. A subcommunity addressing these themes has formed around the Participatory
Design Conference and the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW).
A second example is the growing focus on design methods: Usability can be designed as well as
evaluated, but a design-time usability process entails coordination with graphical and interaction
designers that is still just beginning. This design thread has led to another subcommunity formed
around the ACM Symposium on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS), a conference series started in
1995.
Complementary to moving usability work further upstream in design and development is a focus in
usability engineering on cost-benefit tradeoffs in methods (Bias and Mayhew 1994). The most
evident manifestation of this theme has been widespread effort at developing "low-cost" inspection
and walkthrough methods. But cost-benefit is a complex issue. Different methods have different
goals, producing different types of benefits. Some continuing questions for usability engineering are
how methods can leverage foundations in science and theory; how methods can be evaluated; and
how different types of methods, like laboratory studies, field studies, walkthroughs, and analytic
models, can be integrated with one another and with other methods and processes of system
development.
The second group of papers in this volume shows how usability engineering is developing. It is
addressing an ever-greater variety of types of systems and usability phenomena, such as worker
adaptation. It is developing new approaches, such as the integration of user interface management
systems with cognitive models. But it is also focusing on better consolidation and utilization of results
and concepts in hand.
A key goal in this area has always been to ease the development of interactive systems. Through
time, this goal has become more challenging because the skills of application developers have
become more diverse. For example, this motivated a family of prototyping tools based on the
premise that user interface software could be directly created "by demonstration."
The third group of papers summarizes the progress to date in user interface software and tools and
identifies some of the key challenges for the future. The key questions for user interface software
and tools are what models and techniques will be most appropriate for creating interfaces with
controls and displays quite different from those of the graphical user interface paradigm of the past
20 years. For example, what are suitable architectures and tools for interfaces with voice, gesture, or
position-sensing controls and immersive or wearable displays?
modulated, by information technology. In the new millennium these considerations may yet become
mainstream as foundations for HCI and as criteria for usability engineering methods.
Acknowledgment
This is a much revised and broadened descendant of a survey paper that appeared in Annual Review
of Psychology, Volume 48, Palo Alto, CA: Annual Reviews, 1997, pages 501522. That earlier version
develops some of the points here in more detail and with more complete citations. I am grateful to
Andrew Dillon, Brad Myers, Sharon Oviatt, Ben Shneiderman, Alistair Sutcliffe, Terry Winograd, and
an anonymous reviewer for guidance, discussion, and comments on this essay.
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