Significance of HCI

The design of everyday things

Good design and bad design

Good designs are harder to notice, as an object with good design is often intuitive or self-explanatory. It serves its purpose and fits our needs so well that the design becomes invisible to us. On the other hand, a bad design is much more apparent because it’s harder to understand and inadequate for the intended purpose.

Let’s have a look at a common example to get a better understanding.

⁉️ Door: Push or Pull?
At many points in your life, you must have gotten confused while opening a door. A door handle indicates that you should pull it to open, and a palm pad means to push. A door with a handle on one side and a palm pad on the other is a good design, as it takes advantage of how the human body naturally reacts with a door. Some doors have push and pull labels to eliminate confusion. But people still get confused because labels require the user’s unnecessary attention and good vision to read them and act accordingly.

Significance of HCI

The most common misconception about HCI is that its only purpose is to make an interface look good. This is not the case. HCI deals with making interfaces that:

• Increase productivity
• Enhance the user experience
• Reduce risks in safety-critical systems

Productivity

Productivity is the amount of work that gets completed over a given time period. Just as a pleasant working environment increases productivity, a good interface can also increase productivity.

We have designed a small activity for you to better understand this concept. Look at the two calculators and timer down below. Evaluate this expression on each calculator:

$$x = 23.5 + 31 \times 4-50$$

Start the timer before you input the first number. Don’t forget to stop the timer once you are done.

Time to think: Notice the time difference and think about why it took you longer to calculate the input on the right calculator.

Despite the fact that both have the same styling and look equally good, the calculator on the right reduced your productivity because of the button alignment. The buttons on the left calculator are aligned ideally. The numbers are grouped on one side, operations on the other side, and the remaining commands on the top. On the other hand, the right calculator has randomly arranged buttons making it difficult to find a specific button.

User experience

User experience is how the user feels while interacting with a computer. Good designs lead to a good user experience and vice versa. For example, how would you feel if instead of saving a document, you accidentally deleted a document that you had been working hard on. Would you feel like punching your computer? Did it happen because both the tabs were so close to each other? Or because you couldn’t really understand which tab does what? There can be many reasons that a bad design is not easy to work with.

Let’s perform a quick activity to understand user experience. See the two text paragraphs down below. Read the text from the first paragraph, and try to write it in the text area next to it. Do the same for the second paragraph.

Note: Notice how you feel while reading the paragraphs.

Was it frustrating? Did you feel like giving up?

The second paragraph was probably more difficult to read because of the color scheme.

Safety-critical systems

Bad design can be more than just annoying or frustrating. It can also be harmful or even deadly at times. The risks associated with safety-critical systemsThe systems whose failure may result in serious injuries or death. are too high, and the consequences affiliated with bad interfaces can be critical and deadly. Here are some examples of such systems where interface plays a significant role:

• Aviation control systems
• Industrial control systems
• Automated medical equipment

We can find many examples from history where a bad interface led to the loss of lives. For instance, a regular flight scheduled on December 20, 1995, from Miami, Florida, to Cali, Colombia, crashed into a mountain in Buga, Colombia. The crash took 159 of 163 lives of the people onboard, including passengers and all crew members. The investigation blamed the pilot, as he had pressed the wrong navigational fixThe area or point used to navigate between airports and other navigational fix points.. According to the pilot’s control panel, the R button was used for going straight, but in the computer management system database, the R button was programmed to make a left turn. When the pilot pressed R, the plane was supposed to fly straight, but it took a left turn that brought the plane over the mountains where it crashed.