HCI Exam Cheat Sheet: 5 Units
Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) is the study of how people interact with computers, focusing on designing user-friendly and efficient interfaces through understanding human capabilities, design principles, and various interaction models across different platforms.
Core Principles
- User-Centered Design: Prioritize users, their goals, tasks, and needs throughout the design process.
- Interaction Design: Focus on the dialogue between users and systems, emphasizing input, response, feedback, and user control.
- Usability & Accessibility: Ensure systems are easy to learn, efficient to use, error-tolerant, and accessible to all users.
- Iterative Design & Evaluation: Continuously prototype, test, and refine designs based on user feedback and evaluation methods.
Key Terms
- HCI: Human-Computer Interaction: The study of the design and use of computer technology, focusing on the interfaces between people and computers.
- Affordance: The perceived properties of an object that suggest how it can be used (e.g., a button looks clickable).
- Mental Model: A user's internal representation of how a system works, formed through experience and interaction.
- Heuristic Evaluation: An inspection method where evaluators judge interface compliance with recognized usability principles (heuristics).
- Wireframing: A low-fidelity visual representation of a page's structure and layout, focusing on content placement and functionality.
- UX: User Experience: The overall experience a person has when interacting with a product, system, or service.
Timeline
- Early 1980s: HCI emerges as a distinct field, influenced by cognitive psychology and computer science.
- Mid-1980s: Development of GUIs (Graphical User Interfaces) revolutionizes interaction paradigms.
- 1990s: The World Wide Web (WWW) gains prominence, leading to advancements in Web Interface Design.
- 2000s: Rise of mobile computing and smartphones, spurring the growth of Mobile HCI.
- 2010s-Present: Focus on ubiquitous computing, AR/VR, and enhanced user experience (UX) design.
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