1962 Spacewar videogame 1963 Sutherland Sketchpad Ph.D. thesis 1965 Nelson hypertext

1969 Engelbart SJCC Demo

1969 Kay Reactive Engine Ph.D. thesis 1970 Founding of Xerox PARC

1970 Founding of HUSAT

1971 Weinberg’s The Psychology of Computer Programming `

1973 Martin’s Design of

Man-Computer Dialogues

1973 Alto personal computer 1973 Superpaint color frame buffer 1974 Gypsy WYSIW YG word processor 1975 Altair personal computer kit in

Popular Electronics

^{1976 Kay and Goldberg’s} “Personal Dynamic Media” 1980 Aaron Marcus’s first tutorial 1981 Xerox Star 1981 IBM PC 1982 Gaithersburg Conference/CHI formation 1983 Card, Moran, and Newell’s Psychology _{of Human-Computer Interaction} 1983 Shneiderman’s “Direct Manipulation” 1983 Tufte’s Visual Display of _{Quantitative Information} 1984 Apple Macintosh ^{1985 Gould and Lewis’s} “Designing for Usability” ^{1986 Norman and Draper’s} User Centred System Design 1987 First Hypertext conference

1987 Suchman’s Plans and Situated Action 1990 Tim Berners-Lee Web browser

1990 First Usability Professionals _{Association conference}

Figure 1. Timeline of Early HCI History

mapped displays, the desktop metaphor, What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) document editing, overlapping windows, icons, and menus? How did the invention and refinement of these concepts interrelate?

A Broadening of Focus

We now reach a turning point in HCI history. The invention and widespread success of the PC enabled hundreds of millions of humans to interact with computers, in contrast to a few million organizational mainframes and tens of millions of minicomputers. A wider set of issues became relevant.

Graphic Design and
Industrial Design in Interaction Design

For computers to become mainstream consumer products, they had to look as good as sports cars and hair dryers. Thus industrial design would play a key role. Furthermore, one reason the GUI became the dominant interface paradigm of the ’80s was that graphic designers and visual artists began to exploit bit-mapped displays to make interfaces more attractive and communicative.

What were the roles of design pioneers such as Aaron Marcus and Edward Tufte in inspiring such developments? How did this movement influence hardware and interface software in seminal products such as the Star, the Apple II, and the Macintosh? How did the graceful design sense of these products manifest itself and become an essential element in other mainstream software products? How did industrial research groups, product-development teams, and scholars and practitioners from universities and design schools contribute and interact?

Usability Testing

By the ’80s it became apparent that there was another implication of the fact that the computer had become a mass-market product for nonspecialists. To design software successfully required usability testing, a set of techniques that draw their inspiration from human factors.

What are the earliest known examples of user testing? How did the concept of “usability testing” evolve into more comprehensive “usability engineering?” Who built the first usability lab? What were the important innovations by hardware companies such as IBM and DEC, and by systems