Human computer interaction: an operational definition

  • Authors:
  • Shaun Marsh

  • Affiliations:
  • -

  • Venue:
  • ACM SIGCHI Bulletin
  • Year:
  • 1990

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Abstract

This paper poses an operational definition for the term Human-Computer Interaction and distinguishes it from the term User Interface. Human-Computer Interaction includes several separate communication paths between the human and the computer's natural environment, the computer's own ergonomics, an operating environment, and an application environment. Each of these paths occur in parallel and have both a dialog and an interface component. A distinction is made between those dialog stages which allow multiple interpretations of symbols (soft-dialog) and those which allow only one interpretation for each symbol (hard-dialog). The term User Dialog includes only the soft-dialog stages, and the User Interface consists of the mechanisms for communicating the User Dialog.