Hacker News Reader

Comment by pooriaazimi | Hacker News Reader

No. It's not UI, it's HI (Human Interface) now!

It's best we all get used to it. It'll be repeated again and again from now on :)

Edit: This is what I mean: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Interface

> Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name. Please search for _Human Interface_ in Wikipedia to check for alternative titles or spellings.

It's still a non-word, but will be an (oft-used) word soon enough (like that damn skeumorphism thing).

View on HN

Apple has been using the "Human Interface" terminology since the 1970s.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Tognazzini

The academic field behind UI design is HCI (Human Computer Interaction), so HI makes more sense :)

And before HCI it was MMI (Man-Machine)...so the term evolves.

Do you have any references for that? HCI has been in use since the late 70s (I believe it originated at Xerox PARC, since the earliest literature I can find using it is from there), and is now the de-facto standard term for all major conferences/publications. On the other hand, searching "MMI" on the ACM digital library only returns it as an acronym for various more-or-less related things.

Maybe MMI is a mistranslation from other languages? This Danish site [1] uses it, and I know the used French term is "Interaction Homme Machine", which I can easily imagine being translated to Man-Machine Interaction

[1]: http://www.eit.ihk-edu.dk/subjects/mmi/intro.php#0

It's mentioned here for instance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_interface. I always got the impression it was a term emerging from the military in the 1940s-50s, when they began to study the ergonomics of cockpits, flight control systems, etc.

When working with engineers from Israel, I still hear the term "MMI" used frequently. They use it the same way I would use "HMI" here in the states.

Apple has used the term HI for a long, long time.

I remember HIG, surely (having read it many times, first for pleasure and now as a developer), but it was always H+I+G, never H+I+something else. But I can be mistaken...

Edit: It doesn't matter if you're an iOS/OS X developer or not. Even if you're a web designer, you should really read Apple's HIGs carefully and thoroughly. They're (by any definition of the word), "great".

http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#DOCUMENTATION/UserEx...

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/userexperience/Con...

Well a Director of Human Interfaces would be responsible for defining the Human Interface Guidelines.

Human Interface (as in Human Interface Device) was even used by MS during drafting of the USB standard. Admittedly that's hardware, not software, but Human Interface isn't a new thing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com