Terry Winograd - Human Computer Interface

Professor Winograd is with Stanford University and working on a project on digital

libraries.

Interaction design has three starting points:

• Human characteristics - perception, cognition (what goes on in your head?) and

control.

• Devices - presentation, sending, integration.

• Activities - settings, tools, tasks

Design finds the fit between what people do and the stuff to do it with. The questions to

ask are:

• What are the characteristics of humans that affect interaction?

• What can we build?

• What do you want to do? (No one wants to "do" computers, we want to

accomplish something else.)

Computer design often looks at perception and cognition, but very seldom takes into

account the affective domain.

Devices are moving out of the box and expanding the interface. For example, haptics -

generate forces that the person can feel. This can be used in surgery where the

surgeon feels the forced feedback on the instrument he/she is using. We are moving

away from the computer as a box to the computer as an environment with large touch

screens, tables with screen in the center of the table, laptops hooked to a network

where many people can work on the same content at once.

The Digital Library Project looked at the technical issues:

1. Service heterogeneity - everything is on a different platform and works

differently.

2. Information overload - value filtering.

3. Physical barriers - mobile access.

4. Economic concerns - different payment models.

Some projects:

• ComMentor - shared annotations, comments for others on pages under your

control.

• DLITE - uniformity across information on the web, in your own files, etc.

• Sensemaker - help sort things out, group by an item, sort and search in

different dimensions (give me more like this...)

• Google - developed by 2 students at Stanford, based on prominence, how

many sites have pointed to this site and how important are the ones who link

to it. Uses link popularity versus access popularity.

• Power Browser - what you can do on a very small screen, such as a Palm

Stanford-California State Library Institute on 21st Century Librarianship Summer 2000

Informal Notes by Susan Martimo Choi