Perspectives of development of interfaces

NORTH KAZAKHSTAN

STATE UNIVERSITY

 

 

REPORT

Perspectives of development of interfaces

 

Prepared by student: Hanilbay G.B

Faculty: FIT

Group: In(e)-16g

The supervisor: Dutkin M.A

 

Petropavlovsk

Perspectives of development of interfaces

It has become increasingly popular for researchers to study management information system users and their relationships with system developers. Motivated by numerous reports of system failure, which were not technical in nature, investigators have sought a better understanding of the user interface. The ultimate objective of much of this research is to guide methodologies for user-oriented system development and design of systems which meet user needs more readily. In other words, the intent is to design systems which are behaviorally valid as well as technically valid. Such a quest necessarily requires us to draw upon concepts from the behavioral sciences. To study user behavior, interpersonal relationships and organizational settings, one must either invent new theories or use existing ones. The latter strategy is strongly recommended for many reasons not reiterated here. But within the behavioral sciences there are fundamental choices among perspectives, and these choices influence our view of the user interface quite profoundly. Adopting any one approach allows the investigator to see and understand certain phenomena but to ignore others. Like the blind man examining the elephant, each observer develops a “trained incapacity” to see the object from other viewpoints. As a result, alternative explanations of research findings are rarely considered, much less reported. The purpose of this paper is to examine four different perspectives of the user interface: (1) user motivation, (2) user-developer differences, (3) organization structure, and (4) the political perspective. Each highlights certain legitimate system development issues. However, each also narrows our view of the user interface. Awareness of these perspectives accomplishes two purposes. First, researchers will be more receptive to the alternative perspectives and aware of the consequences of their choices. Second, investigators will treat the user interface less naively, especially through increased sensitivity to the political factors in system development.

Perspectives of development of interfaces

The original and abiding technical focus of HCI was and is the concept of usability. This concept was originally articulated somewhat naively in the slogan "easy to learn, easy to use". The blunt simplicity of this conceptualization gave HCI an edgy and prominent identity in computing. It served to hold the field together, and to help it influence computer science and technology development more broadly and effectively. However, inside HCI the concept of usability has been re-articulated and reconstructed almost continually, and has become increasingly rich and intriguingly problematic. Usability now often subsumes qualities like fun, well being, collective efficacy, aesthetic tension, enhanced creativity, flow, support for human development, and others

Although the original academic home for HCI was computer science, and its original focus was on personal productivity applications, mainly text editing and spreadsheets, the field has constantly diversified and outgrown all boundaries. It quickly expanded to encompass visualization, information systems, collaborative systems, the system development process, and many areas of design. HCI is taught now in many departments/faculties that address information technology, including psychology, design, communication studies, cognitive science, information science, science and technology studies, geographical sciences, management information systems, and industrial, manufacturing, and systems engineering. HCI research and practice draws upon and integrates all of these perspectives.

A result of this growth is that HCI is now less singularly focused with respect to core concepts and methods, problem areas and assumptions about infrastructures, applications, and types of users. Indeed, it no longer makes sense to regard HCI as a specialty of computer science; HCI has grown to be broader, larger and much more diverse than computer science itself. HCI expanded from its initial focus on individual and generic user behavior to include social and organizational computing, accessibility for the elderly, the cognitively and physically impaired, and for all people, and for the widest possible spectrum of human experiences and activities. It expanded from desktop office applications to include games, learning and education, commerce, health and medical applications, emergency planning and response, and systems to support collaboration and community. It expanded from early graphical user interfaces to include myriad interaction techniques and devices, multi-modal interactions, tool support for model-based user interface specification, and a host of emerging ubiquitous, handheld and context-aware interactions.

One of the most significant achievements of HCI is its evolving model of the integration of research and practice. Initially this model was articulated as a reciprocal relation between cognitive science and cognitive engineering. Later, it ambitiously incorporated a diverse science foundation, notably social and organizational psychology, Activity Theory, distributed cognition, and sociology, and a ethnographic approaches human activity, including the activities of design and technology development and appropriation. Currently, the model is incorporating design practices and research across a broad spectrum. In these developments, HCI provides a blueprint for a mutual relation between science and practice that is unprecedented.

Although HCI was always talked about as a design science or as pursuing guidance for designers, this was construed at first as a boundary, with HCI research and design as separate contributing areas of professional expertise.

No one can accuse HCI of resting on laurels. Conceptions of how underlying science informs and is informed by the worlds of practice and activity have evolved continually in HCI since its inception. Throughout the development of HCI, paradigm-changing scientific and epistemological revisions were deliberately embraced by a field that was, by any measure, succeeding intellectually and practically. The result has been an increasingly fragmented and complex field that has continued to succeed even more.

In other words, interfaces are the areas in which social friction can be experienced and where diffusion of new technology is leading to structural discontinuities (which can be both positive or negative), the interface is where they will occur. Long continues to say that: As practical concept of social interface design, social interface is seen in the studies of human-computer interaction (in particular, its computer interface aspect). The basic thesis is that where a computer interface is more akin to another human, it can facilitate correct responses from users during human-to-computer interaction. Software that can provide such humanizing cues often does it by creating interface with human-like quality (such as giving recognizable gender to a software agent).^[5] Studies are often concerned with how should such agents (like the Microsoft Agent) be designed to make them more appealing (is having facial expressions efficient, should the agent be anthropomorphic, and so on).

In computing, an interface is a shared boundary across which two or more separate components of a computer system exchange information. The exchange can be between software, computer hardware, peripheral devices, humans and combinations of these. Some computer hardware devices, such as a touchscreen, can both send and receive data through the interface, while others such as a mouse or microphone may only provide an interface to send data to a given system

Hardware interfaces

Hardware interfaces exist in many of the components, such as the various buses, storage devices, other I/O devices, etc. A hardware interface is described by the mechanical, electrical and logical signals at the interface and the protocol for sequencing them (sometimes called signaling).^[2] A standard interface, such as SCSI, decouples the design and introduction of computing hardware, such as I/O devices, from the design and introduction of other components of a computing system, thereby allowing users and manufacturers great flexibility in the implementation of computing systems.Hardware interfaces can be parallel with several electrical connections carrying parts of the data simultaneously, or serial where data is sent one bit at a time.