Human-Computer Interaction as an Important Aspect of Software: A Tutorial

Personal computers and smartphones are now used by people belonging to different age groups and professions, and for different purposes. Human-computer interaction is a sub-discipline of computer science that studies how users interact with these devices and use the knowledge to design efficient user interfaces. In this tutorial article, we discuss the fundamentals of human-computer interaction and its relevance. We discuss the characteristic features of window-based user interface and explain why it is more popular than other types of user interfaces. We conduct an experiment to determine the ease of use of various widgets used in window-based user interfaces. Results of ANOVA show that the time taken by users to use different types of widgets vary significantly (
$\mathrm{P} < 0.05$
) for desktop applications (
$\mathrm{F}=32.94644$
) as well as for smartphone apps (
$\mathrm{F}=54.97363$
). We conclude that user interface of software should be deigned systematically and using appropriate widgets.