Fundamentals of Human-Computer Interaction

2021-2022

Lectures: building 640 (PUIO), Thursday 1pm-2:30pm and Friday 9am-10:30am - map
Instructor: Michel Beaudouin-Lafon mbl@lri.fr
TA sessions: building 640 (PUIO), Thursday 2:30pm-4pm, room C105 and Friday 10:30am-noon, room E107
Teaching Assistant: Raphaël James and Martin Tricaud web site

Rooms:

• Thursday 9 September : C105
• Thursday 16 September : E210
• Thursday 23 September : C205
• Thursday 30 Septembre : E212
• Thursday 7 October : E210
• Thursday 14 October : E212
• Thursday 21 October : E105
• Fridays : E107

Week 1 session 1: Lecture Thursday 9 September, 1pm-2:30pm, C105 / TA 2:30pm-4pm, C105
Week 1 session 2: Lecture Friday 10 September, 9am-10:30am, E107 / TA 10:30am-noon, E107

Week 2 session 1: Lecture Thursday 16 September, 1pm-2:30pm, E210 / TA 2:30pm-4pm, E210
Week 2 session 2: Lecture Friday 17 September, 9am-10:30am, E107 / TA 10:30am-noon, E107

Week 3 session 1: Lecture Thursday 23 September, 1pm-2:30pm, C205 / TA 2:30pm-4pm, C205
Week 3 session 2: Lecture Friday 24 September, 9am-10:30am, E107 / TA 10:30am-noon, E107

Week 4 session 1: Lecture Thursday 30 September, 1pm-2:30pm, E212 / TA 2:30pm-4pm, E212
Week 4 session 2: Lecture Friday 1 October, 9am-10:30am, E107 / TA 10:30am-noon, E107

Week 5 session 1: Lecture Thursday 7 October, 1pm-2:30pm, E210 / TA 2:30pm-4pm, E210
Week 5 session 2: Lecture Friday 8 October, 9am-10:30am, E107 / TA 10:30am-noon, E107

Week 6 session 1: Lecture Thursday 14 October, 1pm-2:30pm, E212 / TA 2:30pm-4pm, E212
Week 6 session 2: Lecture Friday 15 October, 9am-10:30am, E107 / TA 10:30am-noon, E107

Week 7 session 1: Lecture Thursday 21 October, 1pm-2:30pm, E105 / TA 2:30pm-4pm, E105
Week 7 session 2: Lecture Friday 22 October, 9am-10:30am, E107 / TA 10:30am-noon, E107

Course Summary

This is a mandatory course between for the first year of the Interaction Specialty of the Master in Computer Science and the EIT Digital Master in Human-Computer Interaction and Design. It is also open to students from other specialties of the Master in Computer Science of Université Paris-Saclay and to the students of the Interaction, Graphics and Design Masters of Institut Polytechnique de Paris.

The course gives an overview of the field of human-computer interaction, including a short history of HCI, a review of interaction styles, basic elements of psychology and software engineering for HCI, an in-depth analysis of graphical interaction, a sampling of post-WIMP interaction techniques, the notion of conceptual modeling, and a range of theories and models for HCI.

This page and its content are solely for students enrolled in the 2021-2022 HCID and Interaction Masters at Université Paris-Saclay. It contains instructor's material (slides and audio/video recordings) that are not to be distributed without the author's written consent, and copyrighted materials (such as articles) that are only made available under the fair use exception to copyright law.

Week 1 session 1 — 9 September 2021 — Introduction

Handouts

• Introduction
• Interaction styles (4 first slides)

Recordings

• Lecture

Readings for Introduction

• Interaction is more Powerful than Algorithms. Peter Wegner, Communications of the ACM, 1997
• Interacting in Chaos. Dan Olsen, ACM Interactions, 1999
• HCI, Natural Science and Design: A Framework for Triangulation Across Disciplines. Mackay & Fayard, Designing Interactive Systems, 1997

Week 1 session 2 — 10 September 2021 — Interaction styles

Handouts

• Interaction styles

Recordings

• Lecture

Readings in Interaction Styles

• Direct Manipulation Interfaces. Ed Hutchins, James Hollan & Don Norman, HCI Journal, 1985.
• Chunking and Phrasing and the Design of Human-Computer Dialogues. Bill Buxton, Proc. Proc. IFIP World Congress, 1986.
• Direct Manipulation vs. Interface Agents. Ben Shneiderman & Pattie Maes, ACM Interactions, 1997.
• Augmented Reality: Linking Real and Virtual Worlds. Wendy Mackay, Proc. Advanced Visual Interfaces, 1998.
• Tangible Bits: Towards Seamless Interfaces between People, Bits and Atoms. Hiroshi Ishii & Brygg Ullmer, Proc. ACM Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI'97), 1997.

Videos about Gesture-based Interaction

• Bill Buxton - Multitouch tablet (1985)
• Minority report (2002) - scene with gesture-based interface
• Jeff Han - TED talk on multitouch interface (2006)
• Leap Motion (2012)

Videos about other Interaction Styles

• Myron Krueger - Video Place (1988)
• Rich Bolt / Chris Schmandt - Put-that-there (1979)
• Pierre Wellner - Digital Desk (1993)
• Otmar Hilliges (Microsof) - Holodesk (2012)
• Microsoft - RoomAlive (2014)
• Chris Harrison (CMU) - Skinput (2016)
• MIT Media Lab - InForm (2013)
• Mathieu Le Goc (Inria) - Zooids (2017)

Week 2 session 1 — 16 September 2021 — History

Handouts

• History

Recordings

• Lecture

Historical Videos

• SketchPad
• NLS/Augment short segment on groupware - Full video of The "mother of all demos" - Edited version
• Xerox Star introduction video - Video of the Star User Interface (1984) - Video of the "Last Xerox Star Demo" (1998)

Note: some videos don't play in the browser and must be downloaded to view them with VLC.

Readings about History of HCI

Papers about history of HCI:

• The Xerox Star: a Retrospective. Jeff Johnson et al., IEEE Computer, 1989
• The Making of the Mouse. Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, Invention&Technology, 2002.
• Inventing the Lisa User Interface. Roderick Perkins, Dan Smith Keller and Frank Ludolph, ACM Interactions, 1997 (see the figures here)
• A Brief History of Human-Computer Interaction Technology. Brad Myers, ACM Interactions, 1998
• (In French) 50 ans d'interaction homme-machine : retours vers le futur. Michel Beaudouin-Lafon, Interstices, 2016.

Papers about visions:

• As we May Think. Vannevar Bush, The Atlantic Monthly, 1947
• Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework. Douglas Engelbart, SRI Report, 1962 (original report)
• The Computer for the 21st Century. Mark Weiser, Scientific American, 1991
• Interacting in Chaos. Dan Olsen, ACM Interactions, 1999

About innovation and invention:

• Innovation vs. Invention. Bill Buxton, Business Week, 2005
• The Long Nose of Innovation. Bill Buxton, Business Week, 2009
• Modeling and Forecasting the Information Sciences. Brian Gaines, Information Sciences, 1999

"Vision" videos to watch

• Apple Knowledge Navigator (1987)
• Microsoft Future Vision 2009
• Microsoft Future Vision 2011

Week 2 session 2 — 17 September 2021 — Psychology 101

Handouts

• Psychology 101 (up to slide 17)

Recording

• Lecture

Videos shown in class

• Monkey business illusion

Readings in Psychology

General psychology:

• Behaviorism
• Cognitivism
• Gestalt perception
• James J. Gibson

Visual system:

• Held & Hein's experiment
• Preattentive processing (from Perception in Visualization)
• Change blindness (from Perception in Visualization) - See also this video and this one

Visual illusions:

• Ames room - explanation
• Mighty Optical Illusions
• Hermann's Grid (my personal favorite) - see explanation here

Auditory illusion:

• Shepard-Risset tone: an infinite glissando (see also the wikipedia page)

Week 3 session 1 — 23 September 2021 — Psychology 101

Handouts

• Psychology 101 (from slide 22)

Recordings

• Lecture

Videos shown in class

• Toolglass and Magic Lenses: The See-Through Interface - Paper, E. Bier et al., Proc. ACM SIGGRAPH 93, 1993.

Readings in Psychology

Motor system:

• The Information Capacity of the Human Motor System in Controlling the Amplitude of Movement. Paul Fitts. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1954. (See also the wikipedia page)
• Fitts' Law as a Research and Design Tool in Human-Computer Interaction. Scott Mackenzie. HCI Journal, 1992.
• Asymmetric Division of Labor in Human Skilled Bimanuel Action: The Kinematic Chain as a Model. Yves Guiard, Journal of Motor Behaviour, 1987.

Cognitive biases (general):

• Wikipedia page
• Wikipedia list of cognitive biases
• Wikipedia page on Behavioral Economics
• Cognitive bias cheat sheet. Buster Benson, Medium, sep 2016.
• 18 Cognitive Bias Examples Show Why Mental Mistakes Get Made. Jeff Desjardins, Visual Capitalist, 2018.
• The Cognitive Biases Tricking Your Brain. Ben Yagodo, The Atlantic, 2018.
• Thinking Fast and Slow. Daniel Kahneman, 2011.

Cognitive biases in HCI:

• Decision Frames: How Cognitive Biases Affect UX Practitionerse. Kathryn Whitenton, Nielsen Norman Group, 2016.
• Priming and Anchoring Effects in Visualization. Calero Valdez et al. IEEE TVCG, 2017.
• Mitigating the Attraction Effect with Visualizations. Dimara et al., IEEE TVCG, 2019.

Week 3 session 2 — 24 September 2021 — Graphical interaction

Handouts

• Graphical Interaction (up to slide 47)

Recordings

• Lecture

Videos shown in class

• Indirect interaction

Additional resources

• All the widgets - 1990 video by Brad Myers

Week 4 session 1 — 30 September 2021 — Graphical interaction

Handouts

• Graphical Interaction (from slide 48)

Recordings

• Lecture

Videos shown in class

• Marking menus - article - Gordon Kurtenbach's thesis
• Octopocus - article - web site

Additional resources

• A Personal History of Modeless Text Editing and Cut/Copy/Paste. Larry Tesler, Interactions Magazine, 2012.

Week 4 session 2 — 1 October 2021 — Pointing

Handouts

• Pointing techniques (up to slide 21)

Recordings

• Lecture

Videos on pointing and navigation shown in class

• Drag'n'pop
• Semantic pointing - live demo (click the demo link to get to the Java applet)
• Bubble cursor
• Dynaspot

Readings on pointing and navigation

• Fitt's Law as a Research and Design Tool in Human-Computer Interaction, I. Scott MacKenzie, Human-Computer Interaction, 1992.
• "Beating" Fitts' law: Virtual Enhancements for Pointing Facilitation, R. Balakrishnan, Int. J. Human-Computer Studies, 2004.
• Semantic Pointing: improving target acquisition with control-display ratio adaptation, Blanch, Guiard & Beaudouin-Lafon, CHI 2004.
• Bubble cursor - enhancing target acquisition by dynamic resizing of the cursor's activation area, Grossman & Balakrishnan, CHI 2005 - web page - Chrome extension.
• Dynaspot - Speed-dependent Area Cursor, Chapuis, Labrune & Pietriga, CHI 2009.

Week 5 session 1 — 7 October 2021 — Pointing / Instrumental Interaction

Handouts

• Graphical Interaction (from slide 22)
• Instrumental Interaction (up to slide 16)

Recordings

• Lecture

Videos on pointing and navigation shown in class

• Pad++
• OrthoZoom
• Crossy

Readings on pointing and navigation

• Pad - An Alternative Approach to the Computer Interface, Perlin & Fox, SIGGRAPH 1992.
• Orthozoom - 1D Multi-Scale Navigation, Appert & Fekete, CHI 2006 - web page.
• Crossy - A crossing-based drawing application, Apitz & Guimbretiere, UIST 2004 - web page.

Week 5 session 2 — 8 October 2021 — Instrumental Interaction

Handouts

• Instrumental Interaction (from slide 17)

Recordings

• Lecture

Videos on Instrumental Interaction shown in class

• 3 palettes
• CPN200
• StickyLines
• SideViews
• Para Procedural Drawing
• Object-Oriented Drawing
• Textlets

Readings on Instrumental Interaction

• Instrumental Interaction: An Interaction Model for Designing Post-WIMP Interfaces, Beaudouin-Lafon, ACM CHI 2000.
• Reification, Polymorphism and Reuse: Three Design Principles for Designing Visual Interfaces, Beaudouin-Lafon & Mackay
• The Architecture and Implementation of CPN2000, A Post-WIMP Graphical Application, Beaudouin-Lafon & Lassen, ACM UIST 2000. CPNtools web site.
• Beyond Snapping: Persistent, Tweakable Alignment and Distribution with StickyLines, Ciolfi Felice et al., UIST 2106.
• Side Views: Persistent, On-Demand Previews for Open-Ended Tasks, Terry & Mynatt, UIST 2002.
• Supporting Expressive Procedural Art Creation through Direct Manipulation, Jacobs et al., CHI 2017.
• Object-Oriented Drawing, Xia et al., CHI 2016.
• Textlets: Supporting Constraints and Consistency in Text Documents, Han et al., CHI 2020.

Week 6 session 1 — 14 October 2021 — Conceptual Modeling

Handouts

• Conceptual modeling (up to slide 22)

Recordings

• Lecture

Readings

• Don Norman - The Design of Everyday Things
• Carelman - Catalogue des objets introuvables - see also images from the original edition or a Google Image search (click "Images" if you get the regular Google result page).

Week 6 session 2 — 15 October 2021 — Conceptual Modeling

Handouts

• Conceptual modeling (from slide 22)

Recordings

• Lecture

Readings

• Planar maps: An Interaction Paradigm for Graphic Design, P. Baudelaire & M. Gangnet, CHI'89.
  For the maths behind it: Incremental Computation of Planar Maps, M. Gangnet et al, SIGGRAPH'89.

Week 7 session 1 — 21 October 2021 — Theories and Models

Handouts

• Theories and Models (up to slide 22)

Recordings

• Lecture

Readings

• Flat Earth
• Heliocentrism and the Copernician revolution. Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo
• Karl Popper. His most famous book:
  The Logic of Scientific Discovery
• HCI Models, Theories, and Frameworks, John Carroll (Ed). Available also on ScienceDirect. I used this book extensively to prepare this lecture.
• Science in action, Bruno Latour - an empirical study of science and technology.

Action and perception:

• Pre-attentive processing - infovis wiki.
• Gestalt perception
• Ecological Psychology. James J. Gibson's seminal book:
  The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (also on Google Books)
• Affordances vs. Signifiers by Don Norman
• Hick's law (also known as Hick-Hyman law). Research papers:
  On the rate of gain of information, W.E. Hick, Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1952.
  How Relevant is Hick's Law for HCI?, W. Liu, J. Gori, O. Rioul, Y. Guiard, M. Beaudouin-Lafon, Proc. ACM CHI'20, 2020.
• Fitts' law. Research paper:
  The Information Capacity of the Human Motor System in Controlling the Amplitude of Movement, P. Fitts, Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1954.
  Fitts' Law as a Research and Design Tool in Human-Computer Interaction. Scott Mackenzie, HCI Journal, 1992.
• Kinematic chain - this entry describes the general concept of a kinematic chain.
  Asymmetric Division of Labo in Human Skilled Bimanuel Action: The Kinematic Chain as a Model, Y. Guiard, Journal of Motor Behaviour, 1987. Research paper about kinematic chain and bimanual interaction.
  A study in two-handed input, W. Buxton and B. Myers, Proc. ACM CHI'86, 1986. The first study of bimanual input (HTML version).
• Toolglass and Magic Lenses: The See-Through Interface, E. Bier et al., Proc. ACM SIGGRAPH 93, 1993. An advanced bimanual interface using Guiard's principles. Video

Cognition and behaviour:

• Action Theory, from The Design of Everyday Things, Don Norman, 2002. revised edition.

Week 7 session 2 — 22 October 2021 — Theories and Models

Handouts

• Theories and Models (from slide 23)

Recordings

• Lecture

Readings

Cognition and behaviour:

• Plans and Situated Action, Lucy Suchman. PDF version.
• Human-Machine Reconfigurations, recently revised version of the above.
• Activity Theory
• Beyond the Interface: Encountering Artifacts in Use, L. Bannon and S. Bodker, in Designing Interaction: Psychology at the Human-Computer Interface, 1991. Introduced Activity Theory into HCI.
• Acting with Technology: Activity Theory and Interaction Design, V. Kaptelenin and B. Nardi, 2009. A recent book on activity theory and HCI.
• The Human-Artifact Model - an Activity Theory Approach to Artifact Ecologies, S. Bødker and C. Klokmose, Human-Computer Interaction, 2011.
• Cognitive Dimensions of Notation. Research paper:
• Notational Systems – the Cognitive Dimensions of Notations framework, A. Blackwell and T. Green, in HCI Models, Theories and Frameworks, 2003. Web site with additional resources.

Interaction:

• A Morphological Analysis of the Design Space of Input Devices, S. Card et al., ACM Trans. Office Information Systems, 1991.
• GOMS, Keystroke-level model
• The Psychology of Human Computer Interaction, S. Card, T. Moran and A. Newell, 1983.
• Project Ernestine: A validation of GOMS for prediction and explanation of real-world task performance W. Gray et al., Human-Computer Interaction, 1993.
• Extensions of GOMS analyses to expert performance requiring perception of dynamic visual and auditory information, B. John, Proc. ACM CHI'90, 1990.
• The UAN: a user-oriented representation for direct manipulation interface designs, R. Hartson, A. Siochi and D. Hix, ACM Trans. Office Information Systems, 1990.
• SwingStates: Adding state machines to Java and the Swing toolkit, C. Appert and M. Beaudouin-Lafon. Jal Software Practice and Experience, 2008. Web site with downloadable library and examples.

Software engineering:

• User Interface Management Systems: Present and Future, M. Beaudouin-Lafon, Eurographics, 1994.
• MVC, see also history of MVC
  A cookbook for using the model-view controller user interface paradigm in Smalltalk-80, G. Krasner and S. Pope, Jal Object-Oriented Programming, 1988.
• PAC
  PAC, an Object-Oriented Model for Dialog Design, J. Coutaz, Proc. INTERACT 87, 1987.