Chapter 3:

The Computer in HCI

4/15/2019 HCI 1
 Interacting with computers
To understand human–computer interaction, there is a need
to understand computers!

4/15/2019 HCI 2
Computer
A computer system is made up of various elements: Each of
these elements affects the interaction, some of them are:
• Input devices – text entry and pointing
• Output devices – screen (small & large), digital
paper
• Virtual reality – special interaction and display
devices
• Physical interaction
• Paper – as output (print) and input (scan)
• Memory
• Processing

4/15/2019 HCI 3
 A typical computer system
• Screen, or monitor, on which there are windows
• Keyboard
• Mouse/trackpad

• Variations
• Desktop
• Laptop
• PDA

4/15/2019 HCI 4
 Interactivity?
• Interaction (with or without computer) is a process of
information transfer.
• The devices dictate the styles of interaction that the system
supports.
• If we use different devices, then the interface will support a different
style of interaction
• In the early days, batch processing was common: a large
mass of information was dumped into and processed by the
computer.
• Nowadays, computers respond within milliseconds and
computer systems are integrated in many different devices.

4/15/2019 HCI 5
 Interactivity?
Earlier batch processing
• Punched card stacks or large data files prepared
• Long wait
• Line printer output

Now most computing is interactive

• Rapid feedback
• The user in control (most of the time)
• Doing rather than thinking

4/15/2019 HCI 6
 Text entry devices

Keyboards

• Most common text input device

• Allows rapid entry of text by experienced users
• Key press causes a character code to be sent
• Usually connected by cable, but can be wireless

4/15/2019 HCI 7
 Layout – QWERTY
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0
Q W E R T Y U I O P
A S D F G H J K L
Z X C V B N M , .
SPACE
• Standardised layout
but :
• Non-alphanumeric keys are placed differently
• Accented symbols needed for different scripts
• Minor differences between UK and USA keyboards
• QWERTY arrangement not optimal for typing
• Alternative designs allow faster typing but large social base of
QWERTY typists produces reluctance to change.

4/15/2019 HCI 8
 Alternative keyboard layouts

Alphabetic
• Keys arranged in alphabetic order
• Not faster for trained typists
• Not faster for beginners either!
Dvorak (The left hand has all of the vowels and some consonants and the right hand has only
consonants.)
• Common letters under dominant fingers
• Biased towards right hand
• Common combinations of letters alternate between hands
• 10-15% improvement in speed and reduction in fatigue
• But - large social base of QWERTY typists produce market pressures not to change
Special keyboards
• Designs to reduce fatigue for RSI
• For one handed use
• E.g. the Maltron left-handed keyboard

4/15/2019 HCI 9
 Chord keyboards
Only a few keys - four or five
Letters typed as combination of key presses
Compact size
– Ideal for portable applications
Short learning time
– Key presses reflect letter shape
Fast
– Once you have trained
BUT - social resistance, plus fatigue after extended use
Phone pad and T9 entry
• Use numeric keys with
multiple presses
2–abc 6-mno
3-def 7-pqrs
4-ghi 8-tuv
5-jkl 9-wxyz
• T9 predictive entry
• Type as if single key for each letter
• Use dictionary to ‘guess’ the right word
4/15/2019 HCI 10
 Numeric keypads

• For entering numbers quickly:

• Calculator, PC keyboard
• For telephones
• ATM
1 2 3 7 8 9
Not all have the same 4 5 6 4 5 6
arrangement
7 8 9 1 2 3

0 # 0 . =
*
Telephone Calculator

4/15/2019 HCI 11
 Handwriting recognition

• Text can be input into the computer, using a pen and a digitizing tablet
• Natural interaction
• Technical problems:
• Capturing all useful information - stroke path, pressure, etc. in a natural manner
• Segmenting joined up writing into individual letters
• Interpreting individual letters
• Coping with different styles of handwriting
• Used in PDAs, and tablet computers

4/15/2019 HCI 12
 Speech recognition
• Improving rapidly
• Most successful when:
• Single user – initial training and learns peculiarities
• Limited vocabulary systems
• Good for the case when hands/eyes are occupied or disabled
• Problems
• External noise interfering
• Pronunciation
• Large vocabularies
• Feedback may be limited
• Speech is a single channel mode

4/15/2019 HCI 13
 Speech Recognition
• Speech recognition can be used in 3 scenarios:
• As an alternative text entry device replacing the keyboard in the
current software
• With new software especially designed for speech recognition
• In situations where the use of keyboards is impractical or impossible

4/15/2019 HCI 14
Speech Cont.
• Some guidelines for speech recognition interface design
• Consider voice recognition as an input device when user’s hands
are occupied or user’s eyes are busy
• Avoid voice recognition as an input device in open environments
(noise & security)
• Provide a familiar vocabulary e.g., user is more consistent when
pronouncing familiar words

4/15/2019 HCI 15
 Positioning, Pointing and Drawing

4/15/2019 HCI 16
 The Mouse

• Handheld pointing device

• Very common
• Easy to use
• Hand-eye coordination problems for beginners
• Two characteristics
• Planar movement
• Buttons
• Usually from 1 to 3 buttons on top, used for making a selection,
indicating an option, or to initiate drawing , etc

4/15/2019 HCI 17
 How does it work?

Two methods for detecting motion

• Mechanical
• Ball on underside of mouse turns as mouse is moved
• Can be used on almost any flat surface
• Optical
• Light emitting diode (semi-conductor light source) on underside of mouse
• May use special grid-like pad or just on desk
• Less vulnerable to dust and dirt
• Detects fluctuating alterations in reflected light intensity to calculate relative
motion in (x, z) plane

4/15/2019 HCI 18
 Touchpad
• Small touch sensitive tablets
• ‘Stroke’ to move mouse pointer
• Used mainly in laptop computers
Trackball and thumbwheels
Trackball
• an upside-down mouse
• Ball is rotated inside static housing
• Very fast for gaming
• Used in some portable and notebook computers.

4/15/2019 HCI 19
 Joystick and keyboard nipple

Joystick
• Buttons for selection
• Often used for computer games
Aircraft controls and 3D navigation
Keyboard nipple/ trackpads
• For laptop computers
• small joystick in the middle of the keyboard
• controls the rate of movement across the screen

4/15/2019 HCI 20
Touch-sensitive screen

• Detect the presence of finger or stylus on the screen.

• Direct pointing device
• Advantages:
• Fast, and requires no specialized pointer
• Good for menu selection
• Suitable for use in hostile environment: clean and safe from damage.
• Disadvantages:
• Finger can mark screen
• Less accurate (finger is a fairly blunt instrument!)
• Difficult to select small regions or perform accurate drawing
• Lifting arm can be tiring

4/15/2019 HCI 21
 Stylus
• Small pen-like pointer to draw directly on screen
• May use touch sensitive surface or magnetic detection
• Used in PDA, tablet PCs and drawing tables

Light Pen
• Now rarely used
• Uses light from screen to detect location
Eyegaze
• Control interface by eye gaze direction
• E.g. look at a menu item to select it
• Uses laser beam reflected off retina
• Potential for hands-free control
• High accuracy requires headset

4/15/2019 HCI 22
 Cursor keys
• For two dimension navigation
• Four keys (up, down, left, right) on keyboard.
• No standardised layout, but inverted “T”, most common

4/15/2019 HCI 23
 Discrete positioning controls

• In phones, TV controls etc.

• Cursor pads or mini-joysticks
• Discrete left-right, up-down
• Mainly for menu selection

4/15/2019 HCI 24
guidelines for pointing device selection:

• Use touchscreen when

• training is low,
• frequency of use is low,
• desk space is small, & the task requires little or no text input
• Mouse is faster than trackball
• Minimize hand & eye movement between input devices

4/15/2019 HCI 25
 Display devices
Bitmap screens (CRT and LCD)
Large and situated displays
Digital paper

4/15/2019 HCI 26
 Bitmap displays
• Screen is vast number of coloured dots

4/15/2019 HCI 27
 Bitmap displays
• Resolution
• Number of pixels on screen (width x height)
• E.g. SVGA 1024 x 768, PDA perhaps 240x400
• Density of pixels (dots per inch - dpi)
• Typically between 72 and 96 dpi
• Aspect ratio
• Ration between width and height
• 4:3 for most screens, 16:9 for wide-screen TV

4/15/2019 HCI 28
 Cathode ray tube (CRT)
• Stream of electrons emitted from electron gun, focused and
directed by magnetic fields, hit phosphor-coated screen
which glows
• Used in TVs and computer monitors

electron beam

electron gun

focussing and
deflection

phosphor-
coated screen

4/15/2019 HCI 29
 Health hazards of CRT !
• X-rays: largely absorbed by screen (but not at rear!)
• Radiation from phosphors: insignificant levels
• Radio frequency emissions, plus ultrasound
• Electrostatic field - leaks out through tube to user. Intensity dependant on
distance and humidity. Can cause rashes.
• Electromagnetic fields: Create induction currents in conductive materials,
including the human body. Two types of effects attributed to this: visual system -
high incidence of cataract in VDU operators, and concern over reproductive
disorders (miscarriages and birth defects).
Health hints
• Do not sit too close to the screen
• Do not use very small fonts
• Do not look at the screen for long periods without a break
• Do not place the screen directly in front of a bright window
• Work in well-lit surroundings

4/15/2019 HCI 30
 Liquid crystal displays-LCD

• Smaller, lighter, and … no radiation problems.

• Found on PDAs, portables and notebooks, and increasingly on
desktop and even for home TV
• Also used in dedicated displays:
Digital watches, mobile phones, etc
• Light reflected not emitted => less eye strain
• Apart from safety and comfortable reasons, LCD can
be more flexible and has more functions

4/15/2019 HCI 31
 Large displays
• Used for meetings, lectures, etc.
• Technology
Plasma – usually wide screen
video walls – lots of small screens together
Projected– RGB lights or LCD projector
Back-projected
– frosted glass + projector behind
Situated displays
• Displays in ‘public’ places
• Large or small
• Very public or for small group
• Display only-for information relevant to location
• Or interactive-use stylus, touch sensitive screen
• In all cases : the location matters-meaning of information or interaction is
related to the location
4/15/2019 HCI 32
 Digital paper and 3D

• Digital paper, also known as interactive paper, is patterned

paper used in conjunction with a digital pen to create
handwritten digital documents. The printed dot pattern
uniquely identifies the position coordinates on the paper. The
digital pen uses this pattern to store the handwriting and
upload it to a computer
• Virtual reality and 3D interaction
VR Enables one or more users to move and react in a
computer-simulated environment by using 3D interaction
(interact in 3 dimension like real situations)

4/15/2019 HCI 33
 3D displays
• Desktop VR
• Ordinary screen, mouse or keyboard control
• Perspective and motion give 3D effect
• Seeing in 3D
• Use stereoscopic vision (combination of display devices that work together)
• VR helmets (detect head motion and possibly eye gaze)
• Screen plus shuttered specs, etc.

4/15/2019 HCI 34
 Sensors and physical controls

4/15/2019 HCI 35
 Sounds
• Sound may be beeps, bongs, clonks, whistles (Used for error indications
or confirmation of actions e.g. key click_
• Speech output
• Digitized speech - recorded human speech directly in digital
format
• Synthesized speech - generated using computers via speech
processing techniques

4/15/2019 HCI 36
Sound Cont.
• Advantage:
• Useful when user’s eyes are busy or user cannot access the
screen
• Disadvantages:
• Limited information because speech is transient
• Lack of privacy & security under open environment
• Speech is a single channel mode, i.e., we cannot listen multiple
messages simultaneously
• Spoken rate (~120-180 words/min.) is slower than reading
(~200-300 words/min.)

4/15/2019 HCI 37
Sound Cont.
• Some guidelines for use of speech output
• Consider as output device when user’s eyes are busy or user cannot
access the screen
• Avoid as output device in open environment, when privacy & security
are important, when frequency of use is high, when multiple messages
must be sent simultaneously, when human memory is overloaded
• Use output rate of approximately 180 words per min.
• Structure voice instructional prompts to present the goal first
& the action last
• e.g., telephone banking system
• “For playing message, press two”
• “Please press two to play message”

4/15/2019 HCI 38
Touch and feel
• Touch and feeling important
• In games … vibration
• In simulation … feel of surgical instruments
• Called haptic devices
Texture, smell, taste
• Current technology is very limited in using such senses

4/15/2019 HCI 39
 Physical controls
• Specialist controls needed …
• Industrial controls, consumer products, etc.

easy-clean
smooth buttons

multi-function
control
large buttons
clear dials

tiny buttons
4/15/2019 HCI 40
 Paper: printing and scanning

Paper usually regarded as output only can be input too – e.g. OCR and scanning

4/15/2019 HCI 41
Printing

• Image made from small dots

• Allows any character set or graphic to be printed
• Critical features:
• Resolution
• Size and spacing of the dots
• Measured in dots per inch (dpi)
• Speed
• Usually measured in pages per minute

4/15/2019 HCI 42
 Types of dot-based printers

• Dot-matrix printers
• Use inked ribbon (like a typewriter)
• Line of pins that can strike the ribbon, dotting the paper.
• Typical resolution 80-120 dpi
• Ink-jet and bubble-jet printers
• Tiny blobs of ink sent from print head to paper
• Typically 300 dpi or better .
• Laser printer
• Like photocopier: dots of electrostatic charge deposited on drum, which picks up
toner (black powder form of ink) rolled onto paper which is then fixed with heat
• Typically 600 dpi or better.
• Font – the particular style of text

Courier font
Helvetica font
Palatino font

4/15/2019 HCI 43
 Readability of text
• Lowercase
• Easy to read shape of words
• UPPERCASE
• Better for individual letters and non-words
E.g. flight numbers: BA793 vs. ba793
Scanners
• Take paper and convert it into a bitmap
• Two sorts of scanner
• Flat-bed: paper placed on a glass plate, whole page converted into bitmap
• Hand-held: scanner passed over paper, digitising strip typically 3-4” wide
• Typical resolutions from 600–2400 dpi
• Used in: desktop publishing for incorporating photographs and oth
images; document storage and retrieval systems, doing away with pap
storage

4/15/2019 HCI 44
 Optical character recognition (OCR)
• OCR converts bitmap into text
• Different fonts
• More complex systems segment text, decompose it into lines and arcs, and
decipher characters that way
• Page format has to be considered
• Columns, pictures, headers and footers

4/15/2019 HCI 45
 Memory
Short term and long term

4/15/2019 HCI 46
 Short-term Memory - RAM

• Random access memory (RAM)

• On silicon chips
• 100 nano-second access time
• Usually volatile (lose information if power turned off)
• Some non-volatile RAM used to store basic set-up information
Long-term Memory – disks
• Magnetic disks
• Floppy disks store around 1.4 Mbytes
• Hard disks typically 40 Gbytes to 100s of Gbytes
• Access time ~10ms
• Optical disks
• Use laser to read and write
• More robust than magnetic media
• CD-ROM and DVD
• Flash-Memory
• Silicon based but persistent
• Plug-in USB devices for data transfer
• Used in PDAs, cameras, etc.

4/15/2019 HCI 47
 Compression

• Reduce amount of storage required

• Lossless
• Recover exact text or image – e.g. GIF, ZIP
• Look for commonalities:
• E.g. AAAAAAAAAABBBBBCCCCCCCC10A5B8C
Storage formats – text
• ASCII - 7-bit binary code for each letter and character
• UTF-8 - 8-bit encoding
• RTF (rich text format)- text plus formatting and layout information
• SGML (standardized generalised markup language)
- documents regarded as structured objects
• XML (extended markup language)-simpler version of SGML for web applications
Storage formats-media
• Images: many storage formats(PostScript, GIFF, JPEG, TIFF, PICT, etc)
• Plus different compression techniques
• Audio/Video: again lots of formats : (QuickTime, MPEG, WAV, etc.)
• Compression even more important and ‘streaming’ formats for network delivery
Method of access-use indexing.
4/15/2019 HCI 48
 Processing and networks

4/15/2019 HCI 49
 Processing speed
• Designers tend to assume fast processors, and make interfaces more and
more complicated
• But problems occur, because processing cannot keep up with all the
tasks it needs to do
• Cursor overshooting because system has buffered key presses
• Icon wars - user clicks on icon, nothing happens, clicks on another, then
system responds and windows fly everywhere
• Also problems if system is too fast - e.g. help screens may scroll through
text much too rapidly to be read

4/15/2019 HCI 50
 Limitations on interactive
performance
Computation bound
• Computation takes ages, causing frustration for the user
Storage channel bound
• Bottleneck in transference of data from disk to memory
Graphics bound
• Common bottleneck: updating displays requires a lot of effort - sometimes
helped by adding a graphics co-processor optimised to take on the burden
Network capacity
• Many computers networked - shared resources and files, access to printers
etc. - but interactive performance can be reduced by slow network speed

4/15/2019 HCI 51
 Networked computing
Networks allow access to …
• Large memory and processing
• Other people (groupware, email)
• Shared resources – especially the web

Issues
• Network delays – slow feedback
• Conflicts - many people update data
• Unpredictability of the future

4/15/2019 HCI 52
 Example 1

• What is the basic architecture of a computer system?

• Here, architecture must be seen from the point of interaction
between human and computer.

4/15/2019 HCI 53
 • The basic architecture of a computer systems consists of
the computer itself (with associated memory), input and
output devices for user interaction and various forms of
hard copy devices.
• A typical configuration of user input/output devices would
be a screen with a keyboard for typing text and a mouse for
pointing and positioning. Depending on circumstance,
different pointing devices may be used such as ligh tpen
(for more direct interaction) or a trackball (especially on
portable computers).
• The computer itself can be considered as composed of
some processing element and memory. The memory is
itself divided into short term memory which is lost
• when the machine is turned off and permanent memory
which persists.

4/15/2019 HCI 54
 Exercise

1. What kind of input and out put computer devices do you

recommend for tourist information system?
2. Discuss the impact of increasing memory on interaction between
human and computer?

4/15/2019 HCI 55