HCI Models, Theories, and Frameworks

Toward a Multidisciplinary Science

John M. Carroll

• Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9780080491417
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: UI/UX Design

HCI Models, Theories, and Frameworks provides a thorough pedagological survey of the science of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). HCI spans many disciplines and professions, including anthropology, cognitive psychology, computer graphics, graphical design, human factors engineering, interaction design, sociology, and software engineering. While many books and courses now address HCI technology and application areas, none has addressed HCI's multidisciplinary foundations with much scope or depth. This text fills a huge void in the university education and training of HCI students as well as in the lifelong learning and professional development of HCI practitioners. Contributors are leading researchers in the field of HCI. If you teach a second course in HCI, you should consider this book.

This book provides a comprehensive understanding of the HCI concepts and methods in use today, presenting enough comparative detail to make primary sources more accessible. Chapters are formatted to facilitate comparisons among the various HCI models. Each chapter focuses on a different level of scientific analysis or approach, but all in an identical format, facilitating comparison and contrast of the various HCI models. Each approach is described in terms of its roots, motivation, and type of HCI problems it typically addresses. The approach is then compared with its nearest neighbors, illustrated in a paradigmatic application, and analyzed in terms of its future.

This book is essential reading for professionals, educators, and students in HCI who want to gain a better understanding of the theoretical bases of HCI, and who will make use of a good background, refresher, reference to the field and/or index to the literature.

• Contributors are leading researchers in the field of Human-Comptuter Interaction
• Fills a major gap in current literature about the rich scientific foundations of HCI
• Provides a thorough pedogological survey of the science of HCI

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Toward a Multidisciplinary Science of Human-Computer Interaction

John M. Carroll, Virginia Tech

Human-computer interaction (HCI) lies at the intersection between the social and behavioral sciences on the one hand, and computer and information technology on the other. It is concerned with understanding how people make use of devices and systems that incorporate or embed computation, and how such devices and systems can be more useful and more usable. It is the fastest-growing and the most visible part of computer science. Across the world, computer-science graduates are flooding into HCI courses and careers. The exciting, and also sometimes troubling, impacts of computing on societies, economies, cultures, and all sorts of human activities and organizations are impacts of HCI.

HCI professionals analyze and design user interfaces and new user-interface technologies. In the past, they helped to develop and investigate the concepts of the now-pervasive graphical user interface paradigm of windows, menus, icons, and mouse pointing. They created software tools and development environments to facilitate the construction of graphical user interfaces. They pioneered the use of voice and video in user interfaces, hypertext links, interactive tutorials, and context-sensitive help systems. Today, this work continues in the development of input and display devices for mobile computing, information visualizations for digital libraries, and navigation techniques for virtual environments.

HCI professionals also integrate and evaluate applications of technology to support human activities. HCI has developed a large variety of methods for understanding the tasks and work practices of people and their organizations in ways that help frame new possibilities for computer support and that then help assess the obtained utility and usability of devices and systems. Much of the early work in HCI focused on office systems. The ideas that underlie modern word processing and conferencing systems came from this work. Methods work in HCI ranges from the development of checklists, guidelines, and surveys; to various kinds of walkthroughs and interviews; to field studies of workplaces, homes, and other real-world settings; to laboratory experiments; to various kinds of analytic models. Today, this work continues in every sort of application domain—architectural drawing, high school science, Web systems for e-commerce, and so on.

HCI professionals study and improve the work and organizational processes of technology development. One of earliest foci of HCI work was training and supporting professional programmers. HCI work produced notations and tools for design rationale and organizational memory, and concepts and methods for user-centered design and scenario-based design. HCI has become a primary test-bed for two broad innovations in design methods, participatory design and ethnographically driven design. Participatory design is the direct involvement of users in design work; ethnographically driven design is the detailed study of work practices to ensure that new technology supports work as it is practiced and not as normatively described in procedures. Today, this work continues in support for end-user programming and component software.

HCI is a young field that is still developing. It has been successful through the past 20 years, and it is important to ask how it can continue to succeed. An important element in the development of HCI to this point, and a key to its future, is its commitment to multidisciplinary science.

1.1 THE GOLDEN AGE

With respect to traditional concerns and subdisciplines of computer science, HCI was originally a joining of software engineering and human-factors engineering. It integrated concerns about tools and methods for software development with concerns about verifying the usability of the software produced. This integration offered solutions to critical problems in both software engineering and human factors.

In the 1970s, software engineering faced a crisis over the so-called waterfall development method, a linear organization of software development activities, each producing interim results—for example, the functional specification document—that are handed off to subsequent stages. The waterfall development method was slow and unreliable; important requirements often emerged only after initial implementation, wasting effort and forcing costly reworking of software. Software human factors also faced a crisis; it was positioned at the end of the waterfall, and thus it became involved only after fundamental design decisions had been taken. It was positioned too far downstream to make more than cosmetic difference in software products. These crises coincided with the dawn of the personal computer, creating a whole new set of challenges for software development, many pertaining to user interfaces and end-user applications. This amplified the sense that computing was in crisis.

Towards the end of the 1970s, cognitive science had coalesced as a multidisciplinary project encompassing linguistics, anthropology, philosophy, psychology, and computer science. One principle of cognitive science was the representational theory of mind, the thesis that human behavior and experience can be explained by explicit mental structures and operations. A second principle was that an effective multidisciplinary science should be capable of supporting and benefitting from application to real problems. Many domains were investigated, including mechanics, radiology, and algebra. HCI became one the first cognitive-science domains.

The initial vision of HCI as an applied science was to bring cognitive-science methods and theories to bear on software development. Most ambitiously, it was hoped that cognitive-science theory could provide substantive guidance at very early stages of the software-development process. This 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. This first decade of HCI was a golden age of science in the sense that there was wide tacit agreement as to the overarching research paradigm. And a lot got done.

For example, Card, Moran and Newell (1983) developed the Goals, Operators, Methods and Selection rules (GOMS) model for analyzing routine human-computer interactions. This was an advance on prior human-factors modeling, which did not address the cognitive structures underlying manifest behavior. It was a fundamental advance on the cognitive psychology of the time: It explicitly integrated many components of skilled performance to produce predictions about real tasks. There was a relatively broad range of such work. Malone (1981) developed analyses of fun and of the role of intrinsic motivation in learning based on studies of computer-game software. Carroll (1985) developed a psycholinguistic theory of names based on studies of filenames and computer commands. This body of work was a beginning of a science of HCI, but it also contributed to the cognitive-science foundation upon which it drew fundamental concepts. Indeed, much of it was published in cognitive-science journals.

In the mid-1980s, HCI saw itself as an emerging scientific discipline. A vivid indication is Allen Newell’s 1985 opening plenary address at the ACM CHI Conference, the major technical conference in HCI (Newell & Card, 1985). In the talk, Newell presented a technical vision of a psychology of HCI. It is striking that the conference organizers had recruited a plenary address describing a program for scientific research. And the effects of the talk were also striking. Newell’s talk provoked controversy and new research. It led to alternate proposals, modified proposals, replies, and rejoinders (Carroll & Campbell, 1986; Newell & Card, 1986). It helped to heighten interest in theory and science for at least five years.

1.2 LET 100 FLOWERS BLOSSOM

In the latter 1980s, many new scientific ideas entered the HCI mainstream. One source of new ideas was differentiation within the original cognitive-science community of HCI. Newell’s talk is again emblematic; it helped to sharpen latent distinctions. During the early 1980s, a great deal of work had been done on the learning and comprehension problems of novice users. This work lies outside the realm of “routine cognitive skill,” outside the realm of GOMS. However, it is within the paradigm of cognitive science. It addressed issues such as abductive reasoning, learning by exploration, external representations, and the development of analogies and mental models. Newell’s vision implicitly marginalized this work, motivating the emergence of alternative cognitive-science paradigms.

Another source of new scientific ideas was the growing multidisciplinary constituency of cognitive science itself. Social psychologists, anthropologists, and sociologists entered the cognitive-science discourse, sometimes taking HCI as their empirical touchstone. Suchman’s (1987) study of photocopier use described a variety of usability problems with advanced photocopier-user interfaces. She considered the interaction between the person and the machine as a sort of conversation that frequently fails because the participants do not understand one another. She used this study to develop an important critique of planning as it had been viewed in cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence. This was a paradigmatic case of cognitive science, and in particular of HCI as cognitive science. Suchman brought field-study concepts, techniques, and sensibilities from anthropology, ethnomethodology, and sociology, and she applied them to a real problematic situation of human-computer interaction. Her results provided very specific guidance for developing both better user interfaces for photocopiers and better theories of planning.

A third source of new scientific ideas was the increasing internationalization of HCI. This was facilitated by several International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) conferences held in Europe, and by initiatives within major computer companies. An example is Bødker’s (1991) application of activity theory to HCI. Activity theory was originally developed in what is now Russia; its applications to work and information technology were pioneered in Scandinavia. It integrates the analysis of individual behavior and experience with interpersonal cooperation (including division of labor) and culture (including tools and socially developed practices). Its foundation is Marxism, not cognitive architecture. It addresses the achievement of particular goals in the context of broader motivations, human development, and social systems. Activity theory and cognitive science are not incompatible, but they embrace different underlying values and they prioritize conceptual and methodological issues differently. For example, in activity theory, understanding mental representations per se is a secondary issue.

A fourth source of new scientific ideas was technology. The personal computer, and its word-processing and spreadsheet software, were instrumental in the original emergence of HCI. In the latter 1980s and throughout the 1990s, software and systems to support computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW), sometimes called groupware, became increasingly important. Networked computing became more differentiated and sophisticated. In the early 1990s, use of the World Wide Web became widespread, and within a few years it became a universal infrastructure for networked personal computing. Technological support for graphics and visualization, including virtual environments and augmented reality, and for audio and video became far more advanced and accessible. Handheld computers and cellular telephones allowed the use of computing to become increasingly mobile and ubiquitous in everyday life. These technology developments increased the salience of scientific issues in interpersonal communication, coordination, and collaboration; in browsing, search, and information integration; and in many facets of visual perception.

All of these developments contributed to a scientific foundation far more rich, far more diverse than the starting points of the early 1980s. In the mid-1990s, HCI encompassed nearly all of social and behavioral science. Students and scientists from many disciplines bought their research interests and expertise to HCI. The tremendous range of empirical methods and scientific concepts in routine use in HCI has been a source of strength as the field grew to address new problems and issues encompassing new technologies and new applications.

1.3 SCIENTIFIC FRAGMENTATION

HCI has been a successful technological and scientific undertaking. It achieved an effective integration of software engineering and the human factors of computing systems through the concepts and methods of cognitive science. In doing so, it helped to broaden and develop cognitive science itself. No one could have anticipated in 1980 just how HCI would develop. And we cannot know its future course now. However, the progress of the past two decades highlights specific current challenges.

An ironic downside of the inclusive multidisciplinarity of HCI is fragmentation. This is in part due merely to the expansion of the field and its scientific foundations. In the 1980s, it was reasonable to expect HCI professionals, particularly researchers, to have a fairly comprehensive understanding of the concepts and methods in use. Today, it is far more challenging for individuals to attain that breadth of working knowledge. There are too many theories, too many methods, too many application domains, too many systems. Indeed, the problem of fragmentation may be a bit worse than it has to be. Some HCI researchers, faced with the huge intellectual scope of concepts and approaches, deliberately insulate themselves from some portion of the field’s activity and knowledge. This tension between depth and breadth in scientific expertise is not unique to HCI, but it clearly undermines the opportunity for multidisciplinary progress.

Fragmentation is also manifest among HCI practitioners. In the early 1980s, in a smaller and narrower HCI community, there was a close coordination of research and practice. The relationship between research and practice in this early period was quite orthodox—the view being that researchers developed concepts, methods, technologies, and prototypes, and practitioners applied and developed them in products. This is actually not a very good model of effective technology development, and it has been supplanted by a more interactive view in which practice plays a more central role in articulating requir...