Week 2 - by Lee Chen Yau

In week 2, our lecturer was talking about Human Computer Interaction (HCI). HCI is the study of interaction between people (users) and computers. The basic goal of HCI is to make systems user-friendly and receptive to the user’s needs so that people can achieve their results faster, with lesser mistakes and greater satisfaction.

The terms user and computer engulfs a wider meaning with users may be an individual user, a group, an organization or temporally or spatially separated peoples. Similarly computers may be any technology ranging from desktop PCs, to large scale distributed systems or any embedded system. The study of HCI focuses its attention to the "user" being the central part and systems and interaction to be designed and developed that satisfies the user goals in an efficient and cost-effective manner.

So, HCI has its roots in various disciplines like computers, psychology, cognitive sciences, social sciences and ethnography. In HCI we learn to apply these user centered fields of study to develop systems that are highly interactive, efficient, cost-effective and have high degree of usability.

HCI is a multi-disciplinary field

Goals of the HCI research field are

- improving interaction between human and computer

- improving communication and cooperation between humans

Reference:

https://sites.google.com/a/nu.edu.pk/hci-classroom/what-is-hci
http://www.deepamehta.de/docs/hci.html