Human Computer Interaction
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| How do you know your interface is easy to use? | ||
| UNSW COMPUTING concentrates on empowering students with the skills to design, develop and deploy systems for use by people. It is this focus on people using technology that lead to the development of the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) research group. The role of the HCI (or Usability) professional like that of an architect who designs buildings: an architect designs physical spaces for people to live, play and work in, an HCI specialists designs similar environments that connect with the on-line world. HCI is a multidisciplinary area that embraces engineering, computer science, ergonomics, industrial design, psychology, social sciences, human factors and areas in visual design. The focus is less about the technology but more about delivering systems that work in a way that does not hamper the user from achieving their goals. There are design processes that help identify user goals and prototyping approaches that can help evaluate conceptual designs. There are also evaluation techniques that can help uncover usability issues in electronic systems. Our teaching mission is to introduce students to these processes in the context of developing software systems. Our students also have the opportunity to do a project where they develop complex graphical user interface software applications following these techniques. The process does not start from writing code, it commences with an understanding of users and developing requirements. Based on the requirements low fidelity and high fidelity prototypes are created and with each iteration are evaluated with users. The process has a parallel with scientific methods: the design is the hypothesis of how we expect users to interact with a system, an experiment is constructed to evaluate that proposition and the results of the test formulate our conclusions. The process is iterative, feeding back into an evolution of the design. The process starts again. As part of the scientific approach we use eye tracking technology with our software evaluations to give an unbiased measure of what screen elements a user was looking at when interacting with software. We can answer questions like: Did they see the button? How long did it take them to find the search field? In what order did they look at the information on screen. We don't just teach this approach, we use it in our on research and development work. The usability process was applied in the development of a media authoring tool for one of our projects called AudioNomad. This was one of the first cross disciplinary Australian Research Council and Australia Council art+science grants to look at the deployment of locative media artworks. In collaboration with a media artist, we have developed an authoring tool that is designed to be used by nontechnical audio artists that makes the task of designing locative audio simple. This was used to create two major art installations deployed on the Baltic Sea and Sydney Harbour and is currently being used for mobile audio devices. For students who want a career in designing graphical user interfaces, understanding HCI is a must. | ||
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© 2009 The School of Computer Science & Engineering at UNSW
