# Human-Computer Interaction

> Human perception, cognition, motor control, interaction techniques, accessibility, evaluation, and responsible design.

Canonical: https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/concepts/human-computer-interaction

Human perception, cognition, motor control, interaction techniques, accessibility, evaluation, and responsible design.

- Difficulty: core
- Tracks: Multimodal & Spatial Computing

## Mental model

HCI treats system quality as human task performance and experience. Design from users and context, prototype interactions, and measure effectiveness, efficiency, errors, and trust.



## Primary sources

- [MIT 6.831 — User Interface Design and Implementation (OCW)](https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-831-user-interface-design-and-implementation-spring-2011/) (video)
- [Guidelines for Human-AI Interaction (CHI 2019)](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/guidelines-for-human-ai-interaction/) (paper)
- [Stanford CS147 — Introduction to Human-Computer Interaction Design](https://hci.stanford.edu/courses/cs147/2025/au/) (article)
- [People + AI Guidebook (Google PAIR)](https://pair.withgoogle.com/guidebook/) (doc)
- [Interaction Design Foundation — HCI](https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/topics/human-computer-interaction) (doc)

## Practice

### Design exercise: Human-Computer Interaction

Human perception, cognition, motor control, interaction techniques, accessibility, evaluation, and responsible design. Implement designOutline() returning non-empty values for: userContext, interactionTechnique, evaluation. Each value must name a concrete mechanism or decision.

**Expected evidence:** A design outline with userContext, interactionTechnique, evaluation plus an explicit failure mode or trade-off.

## Review prompts

- What does Fitts's law predict, and what design rule follows from it?

## Build evidence

- **Synthesize: Multimodal & Spatial Computing** — Connect vision, audio, generation, on-device intelligence, robotics, spatial interfaces, and HCI. Produce one working system, benchmark, or evidence-backed design that integrates the path.

## Prerequisites

- None assigned.

## Related concepts

- [Spatial Interfaces](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/concepts/spatial-interfaces)
- [WebGPU Compute](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/concepts/ml-webgpu)

## Learning paths

- [12-Week Multimodal & Spatial Computing](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/roadmaps/multimodal-spatial-12w)