Human Computer Interaction

This is the projects main page for cs4hc3 and se4f03 -- HCI / CHI Courses.

At the beginning of term the class will be divided into 12 groups, each of whom will negotiate amongst themselves a topic of concentration from the list below with at least three ranked by selected priority. At an early designated lecture, each group will be linked to a topic of their choice in a first-come/first-served basis -- only one group per project.
Just after the mid-term period of the class duration, a created wiki from each group will be completed and marked.
Part of this mark will be composed of 11 other rankings from each of the other groups, who will rank and provide one sentence of what is best and one sentence of what is worst about the subject wiki under consideration. The ranking for each wiki will be posted anonymously for class consideration.

Reference -- adapted from ACM (Association for Computing Machinery -- but people can join, too!) http://wiki.acm.org/cs2001/index.php?title=HUMAN-COMPUTER_INTERACTION

Motivation: Why the study of how people interact with technology is vital for the development of most usable and acceptable systems.
Contexts for HCI: mobile devices, consumer devices, business applications, web, business applications, collaboration systems, games, etc.
Process for user-centered development: early focus on users, empirical testing, iterative design.
Different measures for evaluation: utility, efficiency, learnability, user satisfaction.
Models that inform human-computer interaction (HCI) design: attention, perception and recognition, movement, and cognition.
Social issues influencing HCI design and use: culture, communication, and organizations.
Accommodating human diversity: including universal design and accessibility and designing for multiple cultural and linguistic contexts.
The most common interface design mistakes.
User interface standards.
The five interaction styles as espoused by B.Scheidermann.
The Object-Action (or visa-versa) model and its applications.
The direct manipulation method and its importance to CHI.

The Custom Courseware for this course has an Appendix section for VRML beginners so this is a good place to begin studying if you are not familiar with the Virtual Reality Modelling Language. We will be using this to create 3-D interfaces for 3-D worlds, just to get some practice in thinking in more than two dimensions. Although VRML has been around for more than a decade, it is still found as the 3-D layer in MPEG4, has been updated and in a standard in the W3C world known as X3D, which is just VRML with <elements> instead of reserved keywords. If you know VRML, you know X3D.
As far as web references go, the best place to start is on the course web site:
-- http://www.cas.mcmaster.ca/~se4d03/demo.html#VRML

Once here you can take the tutorial, done by a senior thesis student Polo Cerone several year's ago. It can be taken on-line or downloaded and worked through locally -- either is equivalent.