There’s a grab bag of interaction design practices. These link up with different theories in HCI. Once you get to a company, that company has certain pieces of the bigger picture that they focus on / use.

It’s important to scale these various components… including:
World View
Philosophy
Theory
Methodology
Method
Techniques
Tools

And to see where the company stresses its focus.Once you see what sort of method the company wants to focus on, you can see where it fits into Theory, what Philosophy it uses, where it sits in the company’s World View, and etc.

HCI Has 3 Components (Disciplines)

• Psychology
• Computer Science / Information Science
• Design

Any of these three disciplines can be used to describe different aspects of HCI. In the early days of the field, Computer Science was the primary backbone. In the late 80′s / 90′s however, CS was replaced by Psychology as the major way of looking at / describing / defining HCI. Today, Design is becoming stronger and stronger. In the next 5-15 years design may end up being the “new” primary aspect of the field.

Rogers
Part 1: Describes the existing contemporary theories of Interaction Design
Part 2: Goes through research on how practitioners respond if they understand (or use) theories
Part 3: Own discussion around this topic (what can we do, what are the solutions)

Theories:

1. Early Theoretical Developments
• Scientific Theories regarding human beings
• Rogers has a background in HCI, however she has education in Psychology.
• Look at… Memory, Cognition, Perception
• Example: I want to build “this” so I’m going to design “that.” If I know everything about “this” then I’ll be able to figure out what “that” is going to look like. Research was done on memory / cognition / perception because it was believed that if you know everything about a human being, you can build a perfect interact.
• Cognitive Modeling
• Human Beings use models to understand things. So, the user has a model about the system. Its not about the user, its about how the user thinks.
• However, this lead to questions about what the difference between the designer’s model of the user, which is then used to understand the user’s model of the system, which then leads to a model of the system itself.
• This also assumes that the system has a model of the user.
• The goal here to get the user’s model of the system, and the system’s model of the user, to match up.
• Goms theory: Users / methods / selections
2. New Theories
3. Ethnomethodological Approaches
4. Practitioners Perspective