ABSTRACT
Human-computer interaction (HCI) has contributed much to the advancement of computing and its spread into our everyday living. e prevalent type of interface up to the late twentieth century was the so-called WIMP (windows, icon, mouse, pointer) and graphical user interface (GUI) for the stationary desktop computing environment. is was a huge improvement over its predecessor, the keyboard-input command-oriented interface. Much innovation has been made on the two-dimensional (2-D)-oriented desktop interface since it was first introduced in the early 1980s. ese include ergonomic mouse and keyboard design, hypertext and web interface, user interface toolkits, extension of the Fitts’s law, interaction modeling, and evaluation methodologies. If you look more closely, the innovation in HCI has always followed or been accompanied by an advancement of the hardware and software platforms. Even though the original concept of the mouse and graphical user interface was actually devised in the late 1960s by Doug Engelbart, it was not until the early 1980s that the hardware and software technology (not to mention the possibility of personal computing as hardware prices became much more affordable) was mature enough to accommodate the use of a mouse and the GUI (Figure 9.1).
