One of my ‘A History of HCI in 15 Papers’* “ The Star system (circa 1980, and as described in Byte**[1]**) gave rise to five principles, which in my opinion, are so important and timeless that their formulation and practical application as part of the Xerox Star user interface was without doubt revolutionary.” The Xerox ‘Star’ was a commercial version of the prototypical Xerox Alto – if one thousand fully working systems, used internally at ‘PARC’ day-in-day-out over seven years, can be said to be prototypical.

“The key aspect of this work is not the extent of the studies - using hundreds of participants for one specific protocol - but the combination of three experimental protocols coupled with small user groups.”One of my ‘A History of HCI in 15 Papers’ Paul M Fitts seminal work “The information capacity of the human motor system in controlling the amplitude of movement” **[1]**does exactly what a good human factors paper should.

“This can only be useful work in the domain of blindness, situation impairment, and accessibility in that it may be possible to convey limited Web page information spatially, dynamically, and with a high degree of comprehension at seven (or nine) times faster because of the ability to comprehend highly parallel speech.”One of my ‘A History of HCI in 15 Papers’ It is unlikely that Colin Cherry1 realised the significance the community would place on the small five page paper he sent to the Acoustic Society of America in 1953 [1].

“How would you describe HCI in just research papers - and indeed, could you do this as a teachable unit?” Paris Observatory Astrolabe Inspired by the recent A History of the World in 100 Objects, it’s a simple idea, describe the last two million years of world history by focusing on 100 objects created in the time period from all over the world. Here’s one you may like: “The astrolabe was highly developed in the Islamic world by 800 and was introduced to Europe from Islamic Spain (Andalusia) in the early 12th century.

My final week discussing Dix 2010 [1] which I covered last week, and the week before that too. Now lets: imagine you have a group of children and want to give them lunch. In the UK you might well choose baked beans. Not the most exciting choice, but few children actively dislike baked beans; they are acceptable to everyone. However, give each of those children a euro (or maybe two) in a sweet shop … they will all come away with a different chocolate bar, the chocolate bar that is ‘OK’ for everyone gets chosen by none.

What I hear you cry, “single user studies can’t be valid, even ethnography’s have more than one user”. Well that’s what I was saying before reading Dix 2010 [1] which I covered last week. The critical thing that Dix sees as different is that - and I’m paraphrasing and using my own terms here - single user studies can be used to scope extent as opposed to our normal desire to support a point via a measure of magnitude of similarity across users; as a way of discovering out-layers as opposed to those which look like harmonise sample data; and as a way of disproving the rule which all the other sample data seems to support.

One of my ‘A History of HCI in 15 Papers’* The January 2010 issue of Interacting with Computers (Volume 22 Issue 1 / http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.intcom.2009.11.005) is a Festschrift Special Issue for John Long. This is a special issue dedicated to John because, as the editors (Alistair Sutcliffe and Ann Blandford) say: John Long is one of the founders of our discipline in the UK and contributed significantly to the emergence of HCI in the international arena.

One of my ‘A History of HCI in 15 Papers’ Vannevar Bush (1945). As We May Think ATLANTIC MAGAZINE (July) At 65 ‘As We May Think’ has reached its pensionable age but as yet is showing no signs of retiring. As a researcher within the Web Science and Hypertext domains, and as a member of SIGWEB, I already know who Vannevar Bush is and understand the importance of his work to my field.

One of my ‘A History of HCI in 15 Papers’ Models of the user have existed in HCI for a number of years. Some of the first where developed by Miller in an attempt to apply information theory to the human. Information theory is a branch of applied mathematics and electrical engineering involving the quantification of information. Historically, information theory was developed by Shannon to find fundamental limits on signal processing operations such as compressing data and on reliably storing and communicating data.