My HCI toolbox: Methods for designing and evaluating UIs | Hacker News Reader

My HCI toolbox: Methods for designing and evaluating UIs

austinhenley.com

39 pointsazhenley10 comments

One thing I've noticed about a lot of inward-facing HCI topics is that they are very focused on "the code", but that's just a portion of what's involved in common working loops. I spend a lot of time thinking about stuff that surrounds the code, and it's clear that large orgs are starting to as well, if they haven't already, though there is little convergence on the topic. Am I wrong about these topics not being in the literature? Am I not looking for the right topics or terms, or is this not happening at all in academic research? And if it's not happening, how do we draw researchers' attention to it?

It's difficult for me to follow what you said.

What specifically do you want to draw researchers attention to? Can you give an example?

Your example above of "common working loops" and essentially think time around coding has been studied extensively previously. Before making recommendations, I want to first ensure we're on the same page.

Potential keywords (and conferences) are CSCW and CHI.

Sorry, I should have given some examples.

I'm talking about the secondary work that goes into software, things like environment setup, building artifacts, producing ancillary tooling, and deployment.

I know these might be considered disparate, and I'm intentionally omitting topics that I know are studied, such as formal verification and fuzzing.

I was joking with my spouse, who is a methodologist in medicine, about making a group of researchers set up environments for working on various large open source projects as an example.

Perhaps all of this crosses into operations research?

Yes, dev ops and the surrounding tooling are studied. ICSE, FSE, and CHI publish papers on these topics.

Though you’re right that code gets more attention.

UI Drafter is my approach to solve this problem. It’s basically a no-code and no-graphic design platform for prototyping business apps.

It’s free, please give it a try. Any advice will be appreciated.

https://uidrafter.com

Would be nice if the article tells what the HCI acronym means.

HCI = Human Computer Interaction[1] for the curious. This is the name for the older research discipline that UX (user experience) grew out of. I'm familiar with the term from reading "An Introduction to Human Factors Engineering" (2004) by Wickens, et al. But wikipedia dates it's first use to a paper by James Carlisle in 1976.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human–computer_interaction

Edit: to add further context.

Thank you, that's a very interesting topic. I watched lots of videos and material about computer interfaces of the early days to present.

It feels a bit like the magic and larger innovations stopped at some point in the 80/90's. It's rare to find new UI experiments.

The following keeps me hoping: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGVCVqlXg0Y unfortunately it's just an animated concept.

Did you miss the iphone and gesture based capacitive touch interfaces?

Pen plus touch on the surface devices is also crazy better than keyboard/mouse for plenty of things

Came for the hyperconverged infrastructure, left confused

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