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Hi, I am Scott Klemmer, I’m an associate professor of computer science,
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and I’d like to welcome you this online class, introducing human-computer interaction.
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This online class is based on the class I’ve been teaching in Stanford for several years now,
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and it synthesizes materials from a number of sources.
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First and foremost is the human, the person that’s using the system
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and the other people that they work and communicate with.
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Then you got the computer, that’s the machine and the networked-up machines that run the system.
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And then you got the interface that represents the system to the user.
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HCI is the design, implementation and evaluation of user interfaces.
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This course is going to teach you a set of tools for doing this effectively.
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At the onset of the design project, we often don’t know what the problem is
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or what the space of possibilities might be, let alone what the solution should be.
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Consequently, real-world design is often iterative,
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failed fast so you can succeed sooner.
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Often it benefits from trying and comparing options.
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Finally, it’s important to focus on the people who are going to use your system.
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Good design brings people joy: it helps people do things that we care about,
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and helps us connect people that we care about.
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Good user interfaces can have a tremendous impact on both [the] individual’s ability to accomplish things,
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and societies’. Graphical user interfaces help
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with computing a hundreds of millions of tasks,
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enabling us to do things like create documents, and share photo and connect with family
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and find information.
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Bad design is frustrating and costs lives: medical devices, airplane accidents
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and nuclear disasters are just three domains where bad user interfaces and software errors
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have caused serious injury and many deaths.
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These are big ticket items that take a lot of time to produce.
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What really gets me is that many of these interface problems
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could have easily been avoided.
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Fixing these problems requires following just basic principles like consistency and feedback.
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If effective principles for interface design were widely known
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some of these disasters might have been avoided.
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This is one of the major reasons that I created this course.
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Bad design causes problems and degrades people[’s] quality of life in many smaller ways too.
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Think of all the time that you waste on your bank's website
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or trying to figure out why the wifi doesn't work, or trying to set something on your digital camera.
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Let's say these frustrations take
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10 minutes a day for the average American.
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With 300 million people in America alone, that’s 3 billion person-minutes a day.
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or 18 billion person-hours a year.
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That's a lot of time that we could’ve spent making the world a better place.
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Oftentimes, the best interfaces become invisible to us.
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When an interface becomes automatic by practice, by design and most often by a combination,
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our attention shifts from manipulating an interface to accomplishing a task.
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It’s kind of like a blind person who has practiced working with a cane.
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After all those hours of practice, they no longer feel the cane.
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Their sensory perception is at the end of the cane, experiencing the world.
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That attentional shift is what happens when an interface becomes intuitive.
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Designing great user interfaces requires enormous creativity and a lot of hard work.
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But designing pretty good user interface is pretty easy
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if you know some methods, techniques and principles. I’ll show how.
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Summarize this introduction:
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In this course you're going to learn a process where people’s tasks, goals and values drive development.
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You’re going to learn to work with users throughout the process;
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to assess decisions from the vantage point of users, their work and their environment;
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to pay attention to people's abilities and situation; and to talk to the actual experts.
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You'll learn to talk with a variety of users — both regular and extreme users — and a wide variety of stakeholders.
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As my colleague John Zimmerman reminded me recently,
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users are just one of the many stakeholders in the design process.
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Other stakeholders matter too, helping ease development and costs of production, support maintenance,…
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In designing for people, don't forget the other pieces of the puzzle.
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In creating this class, I’ve integrated materials from a lot of sources,
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including classes like James Landay’s, books like Don Noman’s
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and papers like from the CHI Conferences.
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For those who'd like to learn more,
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I’ve put a Further Reading slide at the end of many of my lectures.
