Human-Computer Interaction
The Information School’s work in human-computer interaction deals with the design, construction, and evaluation of interactive technologies for use by individuals, groups, and organizations, and the social implications of these systems. This work encompasses user interfaces, accessibility concerns, new design techniques, and methods for interactive systems, collaboration, information systems for medicine and health, and understanding the values associated with technology and design. A goal is to make information and computing useful, usable, and accessible to all.
Researchers
Centers & Institutes
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| AIM Research Group |
| Jacob O. Wobbrock, Director |
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| DUB (design:use:build) Group |
| multiple departments |
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| Value Sensitive Design (VSD) Research Group |
| Batya Friedman, Director |
Current Projects
David McDonald, Principal Investigator
The project will characterize the conceptual problems and breakdowns as individuals incorporate new network devices into their homes. It will answer the question: How do users conceptualize interoperability problems with networked devices and how do they currently solve them? Methodological problems will be addressed, and results will be used to create a situated typology of interoperability problems and solution approaches.
Batya Friedman and Peter Kahn, Co-Principal Investigators
The emergence of personified robots—adaptive and autonomous robots with personae—poses significant social and moral challenges. These challenges depend on the robots’ design, context of use, and the psychological dynamic of our interactions with them. The project is conducting five complementary studies into people’s moral and social relationships with two types of personified robots developed by Advance Telecommunications Research (ATR), in an effort to build understanding of this area in the field of Human-Robot Interaction.
Jacob Wobbrock, Principal Investigator
Because of human-computer interfaces’ assumptions about user motor capabilities, the tremendous potential of computers for communication, productivity and entertainment is largely unrealized for people with motor impairments. Building on the University’s user-centered approach to assistive technology, this project is designing, building and evaluating new interfaces that radically improve accessibility by requiring little or no clicking, limiting the need to position the pointer inside small on-screen targets like scroll bars, and allowing users to acquire targets by crossing over them.