In my last post, I talked about the technical elective courses TEAM students can take as part of the program. In my case, I decided to take Data Mining and Human Computer Interaction during the first semester, and will be part of the HCI research team in the upcoming semester. Therefore, I will dedicate this post to talking about what HCI is and what kind of research takes place in this area.
Human-Computer Interaction is a relatively new field within computer science based on the study and design of interfaces between users and systems. These can range from websites and information layout to devices such as screens, wearable technologies, robot communication and even accessibility designs for disabled users. HCI not only requires classical computer science knowledge (programming, databases, networks) but also intersects with many softer areas such as psychology, sociology, cognitive sciences and media studies.
In the beginning, everything was about “making it work”. Users had to adapt to the computer and not the other way around. The programmer had already spent too much time working on complex software to add a bunch of “usability” requirements on top of that, just to make it look nicer (Don’t get me wrong, this is not me speaking! It’s just the answer you would have probably received from a programmer in the ‘90s if you had asked him to change his COBOL-software because users could not figure out how to use it).
Fortunately, things changed with time and though IT geeks remain quite sensitive to comments about their code and interfaces (myself included), new roles such as designers, UX (User Experience) designers, product managers and business analysts have gained more importance in the software development cycle. These people can basically put themselves in the shoes of a non-technical user and think how the system could be improved in order to be more intuitive and need almost no help, nor textual references to understand it. No wonder children can just sit in front of a tablet and slide their fingers like pros after only a few hours of practice. Things are easy now; common sense rules and interfaces imitate reality. HCI is the main factor responsible for this revolution and much of the comfort and ease we find in today’s interfaces would not exist if it hadn’t been for years of research devoted to this field. Pinching, dragging, and touching appear to be magical in comparison to old-school clicks, tabs and enters!
HCI research tries to go one step beyond and study how things will be in the coming years. For example, interfaces have been proven to help teach body language to children with autism – not to replace traditional human tutoring and attention, but as a way to complement it (and even supplement it in extreme cases such as inhabitants of poor countries or remote places).
During the upcoming months I will have the good fortune to work with Dr. Ehsan Hoque, a renowned expert in the field, in the study of interactions between humans and computer-based systems to improve communication skills. There is not much I can say as most of our research is still in progress, but I can leave one question open which I hope I will be able to answer by the end of this semester: can a person improve his public speaking by receiving live feedback from a computer?
– Agustin Baretto ’15 (MS)
