Introduction to the Special Issue on the 50th Anniversary of IJHCS

This special issue celebrates the 50th anniversary of the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies (IJHCS), which published its first volume in January 1969. The special issue comprises 15 contributions from a number of experts in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and other areas relevant to IJHCS. These contributions are best characterized as ‘landscape papers’, providing insightful analyses about the evolution (i.e., the past, the present and the future) of research areas relevant to IJHCS. The areas covered in this special issue include: the history and scope of the journal; foundational concerns in HCI; critical discussions about the issues surrounding digital living in a variety of areas, from healthcare and cybersecurity to digital games and art; the making of interactive products and services, as seen through the viewpoints defined by research in psychology of programming, end-user development and participatory design; and, finally, the issues associated with adapting to various novel emerging technologies, including automated systems, online personalisation, human augmentations, mixed reality, and sonic interfaces. In this short essay, we introduce the special issue, reflecting on the nature and evolution of the journal, before providing short outlines of each of the contributions to this special issue

An empirical investigation into strategies for guiding interactive search

One activity people engage in when using the web is estimating the likelihood that labelled links will lead to their goal. However, they must also decide whether to select one of the assessed items immediately or make further assessments. There are a number of theoretical accounts of this behaviour. The accounts differ as to whether, for example, they assume that people consider all of the items on a page prior to making a selection, or tend to make a selection immediately following an assessment of a highly relevant item. A series of experiments were conducted to discriminate between these accounts. The empirical studies demonstrated that people are in fact more strategic and sensitive to context than previous models suggest. People sometimes choose an option which appears good enough, but sometimes choose to continue checking. The decision to select an item was found to be sensitive to the relevance of labels in the immediate and distal choice set and also the number of options in the immediately available choice set. The data were used to motivate computational models of interactive search. An implication of the work presented here is that engineering models that aim to predict the time required by a typical user to search web page structure or which labelled link a user is likely to select for a given goal need to be updated so that they are sensitive to the extent to which people adapt strategy to the features of the context, such as the distractor semantics and number of distractor

Capturing the distinction between task and device errors in a formal model of user behaviour

In any complex interactive human-computer system, people are likely to make errors during its operation. In this paper, we describe a validation study of an existing generic model of user behaviour. The study is based on the data and conclusions from an independent prior experiment. We show that the current model does successfully capture the key concepts investigated in the experiment, particularly relating to results to do with the distinction between task and device-specific errors. However, we also highlight some apparent weaknesses in the current model with respect to initialisation errors, based on comparison with previously unpublished (and more detailed) data from the experiment. The differences between data and observed model behaviour suggest the need for new empirical research to determine what additional factors are at work. We also discuss the potential use of formal models of user behaviour in both informing, and generating further hypotheses about the causes of human error

An empirical investigation into strategies for guiding interactive search

One activity people engage in when using the web is estimating the likelihood that labelled links will lead to their goal. However, they must also decide whether to select one of the assessed items immediately or make further assessments. There are a number of theoretical accounts of this behaviour. The accounts differ as to whether, for example, they assume that people consider all of the items on a page prior to making a selection, or tend to make a selection immediately following an assessment of a highly relevant item. A series of experiments were conducted to discriminate between these accounts. The empirical studies demonstrated that people are in fact more strategic and sensitive to context than previous models suggest. People sometimes choose an option which appears good enough, but sometimes choose to continue checking. The decision to select an item was found to be sensitive to the relevance of labels in the immediate and distal choice set and also the number of options in the immediately available choice set. The data were used to motivate computational models of interactive search. An implication of the work presented here is that engineering models that aim to predict the time required by a typical user to search web page structure or which labelled link a user is likely to select for a given goal need to be updated so that they are sensitive to the extent to which people adapt strategy to the features of the context, such as the distractor semantics and number of distractorsEThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo