HCI
Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) is the study of how people interact with computers. The field of research and practice includes psychologists, software developers, ergonomicists, user interface designers, graphic designers, engineers, usability practitioners, and more.
I’ve been interested in HCI since I was undergraduate in Psychology (1997-2000) at Lancaster University. My final year project (which I will dig out and post here at some point) looked at the efficiency of different information architectures in hypertext documents. After graduation, I stayed at Lancaster to do a brand-new Masters by Research (MRes) course in HCI which was run as a joint effort between the Psychology and Computing departments at Lancaster. The course taught me user-centred design skills (eg cognitive walkthroughs, usability testing, hierarchical task analysis), computing perspectives on user interface and system design, research methodology (eg the pros and cons of observational research), user interface design techniques (eg paper and video prototyping, interviewing, user testing), and collaborative design of a Web-based application.
During my Masters, I did a 4-month work placement as a usability researcher at Enterprise IDU, an information design consultancy which was, at the time, based in Newport Pagnell, Milton Keynes. Whilst at Enterprise IDU, I ran an eye-tracking research project for my Masters dissertation: An Eye Movement Analysis of Web Page Usability. I also wrote some documentation for the SMI head-mounted eye-tracker and associated analysis tools. Enterprise IDU gave me permission to post it here because a couple of people have contacted me for help with using the eye-tracker.
The following Winter, I went back to work for Enterprise IDU for 4-5 months as Usability Researcher. Whilst there, my Masters dissertation supervisor and I wrote up my Masters research as a conference paper, which I then presented at HCI 2002. Here is the final, pre-publication draft of the paper and here are my presentation slides.
By the time I presented the paper at HCI 2002 (September 2002), I’d started working at IBM UK Ltd’s Software Development Labs at IBM Hursley, near Winchester, as a Technical Author. Since then, I’ve worked on the information architecture and written content of the product documentation for products in the IBM WebSphere-branded family of application integration middleware. As part of that, I’ve contributed to graphical user interface (GUI) design (in particular providing usability, terminology, accessibility, and globalisation feedback to the GUI developers), and designed and architected the Out-of-Box Experience (OoBE) of a product.
About the time that I started my Masters course in September 2000, I joined the British HCI Group (B-HCI-G), which is the HCI specialist group of the British Computer Society (BCS). After presenting at the HCI 2002 conference, I wrote an article for the B-HCI-G’s quarterly magazine, Interfaces, about the experience of my first conference (Issue 54). I offered my services as a regular contributor with the idea that it might encourage me to write more often. I was invited along to a Communications committee meeting that December and, by the time I left the meeting, I was co-editing the next issue of the magazine with the retiring Editor, Tom McEwan. Not quite sure how that happened but I continued as Editor (then co-Editor for my last couple of issues) for the next three-and-a-half years (Issues 54-69).
After retiring from Interfaces, I organised the HCI Practice track of the B-HCI-G’s HCI 2007 conference, which took place in September 2007 at Lancaster University.
Posted by Laura on 19-02-2006 at 08:02 pm