Human-Computer Interaction Theories - Essay Example

Farzeela Faisal Standard Academic Research Oct-24-2005 Human Computer Interaction Theories Human- computer interaction (HCI) is the study of how people interact with computing technology. Certain central aspects of computers are as much a function of the nature of human beings as of the nature of the computers themselves. The relevance of both computer science and psychology to the design of programming languages and the interface is easy to argue, but psychological considerations enter into more topics in computer science than is usually realized. Abstract Human- computer interaction (HCI) is a multidisciplinary field in which psychology and other social sciences unite with computer science and related technical fields with the goal of making computing systems that are both useful and usable. It is a blend of applied and basic research, both drawing from psychological research and contributing new ideas to it. New technologies continuously challenge HCI researchers with new options, as do the demands of new audiences and uses. A variety of usability methods have been developed that draw upon psychological principles. HCI research has expanded beyond its roots in the cognitive processes of individual users to include social and organizational processes involved in computer usage in real environments as well as the use of computers in collaboration. HCI researchers need to be mindful of the longer-term changes brought about by the use of computing in a variety of venues. One major area of work in the field focuses on the design of computer systems. The goal is to produce software and hardware that is useful, usable, and aesthetically pleasing. A closely aligned area is the evaluation of systems in use. This is related to design, because to know if a design is useful or usable requires observing it in use. However, this also extends to the study of the larger social consequences of use. Increasingly, evaluation takes place at multiple levels of analysis: the individual, the group, the organization, and the industry or societal sector. (The Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction. Contributors: Stuart K. Card - author, Thomas P. Moran - author, Allen P. Newell - editor. Publisher: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Place of Publication) The methodological and conceptual issues at these different levels of evaluation are quite different. Psychologists are typically most interested in the smaller levels of aggregation, attempted to provide a largely psychological account of the "productivity paradox," a phenomenon first identified by economists who found a disappointing lack of correlation between the amount of money invested in information technology and changes in industry productivity measures. Activity Theory Activity theory (AT) is a method of organizing observations and a source of explanation. The concepts of this theory cluster around activity (conscious, practical, goal-directed human endeavors) and mediation (acts produce effects only through the help of culturally constructed tools). The concepts of activity and mediation provide insight into the co development of practice and technology through researcher's narrative accounts of the connections between purposeful activity and computer interfaces. Ascension of AT, has readily overcome a current crisis in HCI. The crisis was portrayed as a malaise induced by the impotence of HCI in actual design. HCI has been on the sidelines for most user interface breakthroughs, often offering only a running commentary on why the winners won and losers lost. HCI has been "unable to penetrate the human side of the interface". According to Nardi, "A powerful and clarifying tool, rather than a strongly predictive theory". AT seeks to understand everyday practice within a broad historical and cultural context. The central concept and basic unit of analysis of AT, is activity. An activity is a coherent, stable, relatively long-term endeavor directed to a definite goal or "object." Examples include tribal hunting, software development, and financial management. The most basic relations for the structure of Activity are a subject (person) oriented to accomplishing some object (outward goal, concrete purpose, or objectified motive) using a historically constructed tool. The most fundamental principle of analysis is the hierarchical structuring of activity. AT recognizes three levels and the terminology for these levels uses the words "activity," "action," and "operation" in unfamiliar senses, especially to the new researchers. The three levels correspond roughly to cultural, conscious, and automatic levels of behavior. We are usually aware of ourselves acting at the conscious level, on immediate goals with local resources. This level is conditioned by a larger cultural scope, and supported by automatic behaviors. The boundaries between these layers are open to development. A second fundamental principle of analysis is mediation. All progress toward the goal is assumed to be enabled and constrained by tools. Unlike other theories, AT resists the temptation to anthropomorphize tools as agents. A third fundamental principle of analysis is development. AT builds on a Vygotskian concept of development whereby external social processes are internalized into a person's repertoire through participation in a zone of proximal development. In addition, AT is highly attuned to contradictions that can occur within an activity. These contradictions can occur at multiple levels as components of the activity triangles become inconsistent or incompatible. The drive for development within an activity is basically a drive to resolve contradictions. The organization and principles of AT should be appealing to developers of learning technology, particularly those who are struggling with understanding technology in a broader context that includes teaching practices, school institutions, and historical educational activities. (Bonnie A. Nardi (Ed.). Context and Consciousness: Activity Theory and Human- Computer Interaction. Cambridge) A Critique of AT as Grand Unification of HCI In addition to presenting an AT primer, cognitive psychology, distributed cognition, and situated action were considered as competitors. Nardi suggested that these comparisons are meant to be educative, as a way of helping newcomers see AT through a familiar lens. The argumentation surrounding these terms often seemed to value rhetorical advantage over scholarly depth. For example, in Nardi's argument against Suchman's (1987) approach to situated action, she stated: "It is appropriate to problematize notions of comparison and generalization . . . but it is fruitless to dispense with these foundations of scientific thought. A pure and radical situated view would by definition render comparison and generalization as logically at odds with notions of emergence, contingency, improvisation." (Bonnie A. Nardi ATT Labs-Research Menlo Park, California) Actor-Network theory The shocking events of 11 September 2001 showed that security is a deeply suspect concept. Indeed, we are at risk. It takes only a handful of determined 'terrorists' to cripple the worlds only remaining superpower. It takes only a simple failure of 'security' for civic air travel to become part of a war machine and for a passenger plane to become a deadly missile. It takes only a coordinated and targeted effort at a few domains: a financial center, a center of government control or a telecommunications system to create chaos and pandemonium. It takes only a few cameras connected to satellites to turn such local events into global spectacles with global consequences. (Human-Computer Interaction: Psychological Aspects of the Human Use of Computing. Contributors: Gary M. Olson - author, Judith S. Olson - author. Journal Title: Annual Review of Psychology.) Actor-network theory (ANT), an approach developed by scholars including Latour, Callon and Law from the study of science and technology, to the qualitative research traditions presently used in information systems research. The question is how actor-network theory can form a framework that can be useful for studying the implementation of information systems Actor-network theory declares that the world is full of hybrid entities (Latour 1993) containing both human and non-human elements, and was developed to analyze situations where separation of these elements is difficult. One could question, for instance, which part of a piece of software is just an inanimate object and which the result of human interactions. It is difficult to differentiate a computer program's technical aspects from the influence exerted by the socio-cultural background of the software development team. What seems, on the surface, to be social is partly technical, and what may appear to be only technical is partly social. ANT deals with the social-technical divide by denying that purely technical or purely social relations are possible. It offers the notion of heterogeneity to describe projects such as one using a programming language, database management system, barcode scanner, human programmer and operator in the construction of a computer system. 957 The use of heterogeneous entities (Bijker, Hughes et al. 1987) then avoids questions of: 'is it social' or 'is it technical' as missing the point, which should be: "is this association stronger or weaker than that one" (Latour 1988). ANT considers both social and technical determinism to be flawed and proposes instead a socio-technical account (Latour 1986; Law and Callon 1988) in which neither social nor technical positions are privileged. Latour (1991:117) argues that: "Contrary to the claims of those who want to hold either the state of technology or that of society constant, it is possible to consider a path of an innovation in which all the actors co evolve." To address the need to treat both human and non-human actors fairly and in the same way, ANT is based upon three principles: agnosticism, generalized symmetry and free association. A network becomes durable partly due to the durability of the bonds that hold it together, but also because it is itself composed of a number of durable and simplified networks as networks are always unreliable and can become unstable. In an object-oriented programming environment each component of the computer program can be considered as an object with its own properties, methods and actions. In common with the encapsulation of objects in object-oriented environments the actors, or 'heterogeneous entities' (Bijker, Hughes et al. 1987), encountered in actor-network theory have attributes and methods and may themselves be composed of other objects or actors. Actor-network theory has been used to investigate the success of a number of technological innovations and, in particular, to describe a number of heroic failures. Understanding innovation as an actor-network has four main elements: characteristics of the innovation itself, the nature of the communication channels, the passage of time, and the social system. An alternative view of innovation is that proposed in actor network theory and the core of this approach is translation (Law 1992) that can be defined as: "... the means by which one entity gives a role to others." (Singleton and Michael 1993:229) An actor-network is configured (Grint and Woolgar 1997) by the enrolment of both human and non-human allies, and this is done by means of a series of negotiations. A heterogeneous engineer is then able to speak on behalf of other actors enrolled in the network. A network becomes durable when actors feel no need to spend time opening and looking inside black boxes, but just accept these as given. As an example of how this might be applied in an information systems implementation, consider the adoption of Java in a particular systems development project in a situation where the consultants had no previous experience of this language. An innovation diffusion approach would, in outline, begin with a consideration of the characteristics of Java including its evolution from C++, its degree of object-orientation, the portability of its applications, and so on, and how these characteristics might help or hinder its adoption. It would then look at the channels through which information about the innovation reached the developers: the computer press, university or training courses, friends from other companies, etc, and how effective these were in delivering the message. Next it would consider aspects of the development company relating to its programming 'culture'; things like what programming languages had been used in the past, the background of the programmers, and the type of applications they had previously developed. On the other hand, innovation translation would concentrate on issues of network formation. It would investigate the alliances and networks built up by the consulting company, their programmers, Java, the potential users, and other actors involved in the implementation. It would concentrate on the negotiations that allow the network to be configured by the enrolment of both human and non-human allies, and would consider Java's characteristics only as network effects resulting from association. Actor-network theory would suggest that it is not any innate properties of Java that are important, but rather network associations such as Java's possibilities for the creation of Web applets and portable applications that are the significant factors in its adoption. It would look at the process of re-definition in which Java sought to impose definitions of portable applications and Web programming on others; how it 'interested' the programmers and then got them to follow its interests. (Arthur Tatnall, Anthony Gilding Department of Information Systems, Centre for Educational Development and Support) Actor-network theory draws on the strengths of qualitative research to provide a powerful, but somewhat different framework for understanding IS innovation. In refusing to accept the social/technical divide, and by treating human and non-human actors impartially, it avoids the essentialism, lack of heterogeneity and explanation by use of binaries that are inherent in many other methodologies. As an alternative to innovation diffusion, a theory of innovation translation offers an approach to explaining innovation that does not rely on any supposedly innate nature of the innovation, or specific characteristics of the change agents or society, but rather on a process of network formation in which all actors seek to persuade others to become their allies in promoting the acceptance of their own view of the way the problem can best be solved. Actor-network theory offers advantages over other IS research methodologies, particularly in situations where 'political' considerations are important. Actor-network theory extends ethnography to allow an analysis of both humans and technology by using a single register to analyze both, so avoiding the need to consider one as context for the other. It helps the researcher not to think in terms of human/non-human binaries and the different discourse with which each may be aligned. An actor-network analysis of information systems innovation may well be described as ethnography but one that develops themes that conceptualize people and artifacts in terms of socio-technical networks, thus employing concepts such as networks, enrolments and actors. Distributed Cognition Theory Distributed Cognition is a hybrid approach to studying all aspects of cognition, from a cognitive, social and organizational perspective. The most well known level of analysis is to account for complex socially distributed cognitive activities, of which a diversity of technological artifacts and other tools and representations are an indispensable part. (Distributed Cognition, Yvonne Rogers and Mike Scaife, COGS, University of Sussex). Distributed cognition (sometimes referred to as social or situated cognition) was first introduced to the HCI community by Lave (1988) and Hutchins (1995), which stems from anthropological and sociological studies of real-world work situations (Olson 1994). It recognizes how people's actions are intimately intertwined with the artifacts of their work; their team member's roles, responsibilities, and actions; and even their cultural and historical setting. This line of thinking has inspired a number of design ideas, notably in the design of the work environment. Deep analyses of how people use their desks with its piles of papers and sensitivity to location have led to interfaces that display results of searches in spatial arrangements reflecting some aspect of the material, either its date or content. (Human-Computer Interaction: Psychological Aspects of the Human Use of Computing. Contributors: Gary M. Olson - author, Judith S. Olson - author. Journal Title: Annual Review of Psychology.) When it was introduced, it challenged the dominant paradigm within HCI, that cognition primarily involved the psychological and mental processes of individuals. The connection between distributed cognition and ethnography is not only in the insistence that our understanding of human activity be located outside individual mental processes, in human interaction, but also in the conviction that to gain an understanding of human activity, ethnographic, field-based methodologies are required. (The Human-Computer Interaction Handbook: Fundamentals, Evolving Technologies, and Emerging Applications. Contributors: Julie A. Jacko - editor, Andrew Sears - editor. Publisher: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates) A general assumption of the distributed cognition approach is that cognitive systems consisting of more than one individual have cognitive properties that differ from those individuals that participate in those systems. Another property is that the knowledge possessed by members of the cognitive system is both highly variable and redundant. Individuals working together on a collaborative task are likely to possess different kinds of knowledge and so will engage in interactions that will allow them to pool the various resources to accomplish their tasks. In addition the individuals share much knowledge, which enables them to adopt various communicative practices. Another important property is the distribution of access to information in the cognitive system. Sharing access and knowledge enables the coordination of expectations to emerge, which in turn form the basis of coordinated action. As noted by Hutchins (1995, p374): "...since most learning in this setting happens in the doing, the changes to internal media that permit them to be coordinated with external media happen in the same processes that bring the media into coordination with one another. The changes to the quartermasters' skills and the knowledge produced by this process are the mental residua of the process". (Distributed Cognition, Yvonne Rogers and Mike Scaife, COGS, University of Sussex) Conclusion Theories and problems in HCI today parallel some of the theoretical transitions that we witnessed in the 1970s in cognitive science and in the 1960s in verbal learning. The question is, how much of people's behavior can be explained by factors generalizable to all users, regardless of domain expertise or meaning. In the early 1970s in the area of verbal learning, we broke from studying learning of nonsense syllables to learning in richer environments. In HCI there is a similar transition from understanding generic behavior (Gestalt explanations of the understandability of visual layouts, tradeoffs in using mouse-menu input devices versus learned keystroke combinations) to more knowledge-centered behavior. For example, a recent study of expert/novice searchers of large knowledge sources (such as the World Wide Web) showed that both strategies and successes were highly dependent on domain expertise. The person familiar with medical information sources was much better and faster at confirming the appropriateness of a treatment for a diagnosis than the layman and worse at finding the best price for a consumer product. Works Cited Arthur Tatnall, Anthony Gilding Department of Information Systems, Center for Educational Development and Support Bonnie A. Nardi (Ed.). Context and Consciousness: Activity Theory and Human- Computer Interaction. Cambridge Distributed Cognition, Yvonne Rogers and Mike Scaife, COGS, University of Sussex Human-Computer Interaction: Psychological Aspects of the Human Use of Computing. Contributors: Gary M. Olson - author, Judith S. Olson - author. Journal Title: Annual Review of Psychology. The Human-Computer Interaction Handbook: Fundamentals, Evolving Technologies, and Emerging Applications. Contributors: Julie A. Jacko - editor, Andrew Sears - editor. Publisher: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates The Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction. Contributors: Stuart K. Card - author, Thomas P. Moran - author, Allen P. Newell - editor. Publisher: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Place of Publication Read More