How HCI is standing on the shoulders of giants

I will be quoting many HCI designers and other technology thought leaders, as well as making reading suggestions. There is no way for me to be comprehensive about HCI; the field is too big. Many before me have done an exceptional job, and it would be arrogant of me to attempt to relate or even regurgitate their ideas. I recommend making a list of thinkers along the way and following these thought leaders on Twitter. Many of them contribute to the community, and reading what they have to say will not only inform your work but also help you relate to others around you.

I highly recommend reading the following books: 

Computers and technology are intimately intertwined with our lives. Because of this, paying attention to pop culture, movies, documentaries, and TV can make you a better HCI student and a better designer:

  • The Lo and Behold documentary by Werner Herzog:
  • An excellent documentary about the internet, software, and the way the world has changed. Werner Herzog is both fun to listen to and has some great insights.
  • Objectified by Gary Hustwit (Twitter: @gary_hustwit):
  • An insightful documentary about product design and the things that we use in our world. 
  • Design + Thinking by Mu-Ming Tsai:
  • Design Thinking has been popularized by IDEO and distributed across the design industry to be used as a process at IBM down to design.
  • Her by Spike Jonze:
  • An authentic look at humanity and a not-too-distant future where computers and artificial intelligence are intertwined.
  • Steve Jobs by Danny Boyle:
  • A unique look at the founder of Apple post mortem.  

HCI is a broad field with lots of movers and shakers in each specialty. As we continue to grow our HCI skills, there are several thought leaders that, as an HCI practitioner, you should be aware of. This list is by no means exhaustive but should give you the right starting place to continue to explore. I highly recommend you highlight any names you don't recognize and do some research along the way. This book is an amalgamation of all of these thinkers' thoughts, and I am sure that some have been left out. The reality is that HCI covers a lot of different professions, which is both a good thing and a hard thing to review:

Computer science is the study of computers and computational systems:

  • Alan Turing: The founder of the artificial intelligence field
  • Steve Wozniak: The Apple co-founder (Twitter: @stevewoz)
  • Mark Weiser, XeroxPARC: The inventor of ubiquitous computing (ubi-comp)
  • Alan Kay: Pioneer in object-oriented programming
  • Bill Gates: Microsoft founder and pioneer in BASIC programming (Twitter: 
    @BillGates)

Computer engineering involves the design and development of computer systems and sophisticated digital logic devices:

  • Guido van Rossum: Python inventor (Twitter: @gvanrossum)
  • Ryan Dahl: Node.js inventor (Twitter: @ry)
  • Jordan Walke: React inventor (Twitter: @jordwalke)
  • Tim Berners Lee: The inventor of the internet (HTTP and HMTL) (Twitter: @timberners_lee)
  • Larry Page: The founder of Google and search indexing (Twitter: @Iarrypage)

Design/branding is all about creating a brand identity and all the visual communication elements that allow a brand to exist in the world. Branding is the larger ethos that allows all of a company's services, products, interfaces, and marking materials to be cohesive:

  • Jonathan Ive: Industrial designer/product lead at Apple
  • Dieter Rams: Product designer at BRAUN
  • Tim Brown: Former IDEO CEO and author (Twitter: @tceb62)
  • Debbie Millman: President of Sterling Brands (Twitter: @debbiemillman)
  • Stefan Sagmeister: Graphic designer (Twitter: @sagmeisterwalsh)

The user interface is the point of HCI and communication in a device. It is the study and design of how humans and machines interact:

  • Jef Raskin: Macintosh project founder; provided a vision of a computer whose legacy would be low-cost and high-utility, and have groundbreaking friendliness
  • Bill Moggridge: Industrial designer and inventor of the first laptop. IDEO founder, father of interaction design
  • Luke Wroblewski: Currently a product director at Google and author on UX/UI (Twitter: @lukeW)
  • Wilson Miner: Product designer, currently at Strip, helped create the Django web framework (Twitter: @wilsonminer)
  • Rachel Been: Currently a designer, creative director, and art director at Google on the material design team (Twitter: @rachelbeen)

Language/semiotics is an investigation into how meaning is created and how meaning is communicated. Semiotics is a crucial tool to ensure the intended meaning of iconography and other interactive concepts:

  • Charles W. Morris: Wrote Foundations of the Theory of Signs and defined semiotics as grouped into three branches:
  • Semantics 
  • Syntactics/syntax
  • Pragmatics 
  • The Belgian Mu group: A collective of semioticians who wrote a series of books and developed a theoretical approach toward visual rhetoric and visual semiotics that involved classifying images according to their differences from plastic and iconic norms.

Psychology is the scientific study of the mind and its control of behavior:

  • Lillian Evelyn Moller Gilbreth: American psychologist, industrial engineer, consultant, and educator
  • Paul Fitts: Came up with Fitts' law, a predictive model of human movement
  • Fredric Bartlett: Pioneer in cognitive psychology
  • Donald Broadbent: Developed cognitive psychology

Information architecture is the design of information systems and environments, applying lessons and architectural practices to the field of data:

  •  Richard Saul Wurman: Inventor of TED talks and advocate for LATCH (Twitter: @rswurman)
  • Ted Nelsen: Information technology pioneer, inventor of the terms hypertext and hypermedia (Twitter: @TheTedNelson)
  • Peter Pirolli, Xerox PARC: Inventor of the informavore concept
  • Peter Morville: Author of Information Architecture and The World Wide Web (Twitter: @morville)
  • Christina Wodtke: Information architecture specialist and Stanford lecturer (Twitter: @cwodtke)

Ethnography and sociology are the systematic studies of people and cultures:

  • Sudhir Venkatesh: Urban ethnographer at Facebook (Twitter: @avsudhir)
  • Barrie Thorne: Professor of Gender and women studies at UC Berkeley 
  • Paul Willis: Princeton University – Sociology and Cultural Studies
  • Phil Francis Carspecken: Indiana University – Critical Theory
  • Marshal McLuhan: Author of The Medium is the Message, media theorist, and philosopher

Human factors and ergonomics is the scientific discipline of researching and exploring the understanding of interactions among humans and other elements of a system:

  • Stuart Card, Xerox PARC: Looks at human factors into HCI, author of The Psychology of HCI (https://g.co/kgs/QYPRi4)
  • Frederick Winslow Taylor: American mechanical engineer who sought to improve industrial efficiency
  • Neville A Stanton: Fellow at the Institute of Ergonomics and Human Factors
  • W. E. Hick: Looks at experimental psychology and ergonomics
  • Dr. M. M. Ayoub: Pioneer in ergonomics and material handling

User experience is the design of products or services, considering a person's emotions and attitudes about using a particular product, system, or service:

  • Donald Norman: The UX godfather and author of The Design of Everyday Things (Twitter: @jnd1er)
  • Steve Krug: UX author of many books, including Don't Make Me Think (Twitter: @skrug) 
  • Alan Cooper: UX author and founder of Cooper Design (Twitter: @MrAlanCooper)
  • Kim Goodwin: UX consultant and author of Designing for the Digital Age (Twitter: @kimgoodwin)
  • Jesse James Garrett: UX author and founder of the Adaptive Path strategy and design consulting firm (Twitter: @jjg) 

Design strategy/systems design is the overlap of the design process and business interest between corporate strategy and design thinking. Corporate strategy is a method that businesses use to identify, plan, and achieve objectives and goals, typically long-term goals:

  • Bill Buxton: Principal researcher at Microsoft Research. A pioneer in the HCI field (Twitter: @wasbuxton) 
  • Jarod Spool: The co-founder of Center Centre, one of the most knowledgeable communicators on the subject of user experience (Twitter: @jmspool)
  • Aarron Walter: VP of Education at InVision (Twitter: @aarron)
  • Whitney Hess: UX strategist (Twitter: @WhitneyHess)
  • Nick Finck: UX educator (Twitter: @nickf)

There are many many more that I could recommend, but start here and expand outward. Designing beloved software is very, very, very hard, so listening to those that have done it successfully is essential. I am just one designer, and I have learned a lot from these people. The reality is that the HCI field is too vast to be covered in one book or by one author. This is an excellent thing as you have the opportunity to consume a lot more content than just what this book has to offer. The role of any HCI practitioner is to continually learn, and who better to learn from than seasoned designers and software engineers?

HCI principles are rooted in humans, technology, culture, and data

Marshall McLuhan, a well-known Canadian philosopher and media theorist, is famous for saying "The medium is the message," a phrase coined in his book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, published in 1964. McLuhan discusses how the role of television impacted culture. How we communicate, how we organize our homes, and how to tell stories have all fundamentally been altered by television technology. It is not a stretch to say that the computer and the internet have had an equally large impact on humankind. 

The medium is the computer, and our role as an HCI designer is to distinguish and define the message it produces, as well as identify how users fundamentally reorganize their lives around its participation. The HCI designer role is sophisticated stuff and should not be taken lightly. We have the potential to make software that can impact the world, and if we care about humans, the technology they use, the culture they impact, and the hype it ultimately creates, we can infuse HCI into every nook and cranny of the world. 

User research – gathering data on humans

As we discussed at the beginning of this book, computers traffic in data with a 0 or a 1. The origins of the computer are rooted in counting, and what makes working with computer technology unique is that we can use that data record to feed back to our work. As HCI designers, we will use lots of data to help in our decision making for our users. Data is a constant cycle in the pursuit of gathering information through qualitative and quantitative methods. We will dig much deeper into some of these methods, but the essence of collecting data is so that we can understand humans and the systems they use. Before we create any solution, HCI looks for opportunities and user needs from data. We then create a solution and use our computer systems to feedback data on how the solution is working. The data cycle created by computers and HCI designers improves our computer software solutions:

Data helps us learn about humans. Humans are complex. We do not think or use logic in the same way that a computer is programmed, and because of this discrepancy, HCI designers have a lot of work on their plates to figure out what we know, what we think we know, what we don't know, and what we want to know.

There has been a lot of data about humans collected over time, and HCI's goal is using data to make decisions. Allowing data to feed back into our software solutions is about distinguishing the signal from the noise. Like a radio tuner trying to find the most definite signal, HCI tunes our skills to apply the most apparent solutions. Data helps us, and we cultivate our data-gathering skills to build better, more useful software.  

Software, like data, is accomplished over time. With time comes change, and our technology documents this change. As technology changes us, we also need to change our software, and this is a constant cycle that we will keep discussing at length.

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