Human Computer Interaction

This week I started my first Human Computer Interaction (HCI) course through Iowa State's distance education programs. The course is actually a psych class called "The Cognitive Psychology of HCI". This is my test to see how working and going to school mesh for me and to see if I'm interested enough in the area to complete a graduate certificate or full degree.

I have decided to post interesting things I learn to spread the news. The class is based around distance collaboration, so we have a wiki with personal information that will also be used for our team project. We also use a discussion board so that off-campus students like me can participate. One of the "open forum" posts by a student included a link to the site of a Mozilla developer about usability deemed the 10 Commandments of Usability. It's all good, but some quotes I particularly enjoyed are

• "Users aren’t dumb. They just have better things to do with their lives than memorizing the internal data model of our screwy software."
• "The job of the UI designer is to provide what the users need, not what the users say they need."
• "The science of design can tell us that interface foo is X% more efficient than interface bar, but bar is Y% more learnable than foo. Choosing between foo and bar — that’s where the science ends and the art begins."
• "When we blame the user, we teach them that technology is perfect and that the errors are their own. Because technology is hard to use, we are teaching a generation to be afraid of technology. We are teaching a generation to believe in their own stupidity. This is a sin, too."