Markus Schmid

Interfaces, Usability, Design. Cognitive Psychology and the Emergence of 'user-friendly' PC Software, ca. 1970–1990 (working title)

My dissertation aims at providing a historical account of the gradual but fundamental shift in human-computer interaction which brought mouse-based graphical user interfaces to the fore and led to the demise of keyboard-based command-line interfaces. Focusing on software concepts and products of 1970s and 1980s personal computing, I trace the linkages between contemporary cognitive psychology and software development influencing the construction and design of this period's new graphical software interfaces. I argue that the emergence of so called 'user-friendly' software products which increasingly came to be associated with GUIs since the late 1970s was closely tied to (1) a growing importance of practical knowledge derived from research fields such as human factors/ergonomics, experimental psychology and cognitive science, and (2) a 'post-cognitivist' understanding of human cognition as situated, embodied and distributed. By the mid 1980s newly formed approaches like cognitive engineering (Donald Norman) or software psychology (Ben Shneiderman) offered different perspectives to researchers and practitioners who engaged in studying, improving, developing or designing software interfaces. A strong focus on casual, non-expert users of personal computing technoloy and their actions in everyday software situations converged with experimental methodology (e.g. user testing and task analysis), new design principles (according to defined usability standards) and an updated notion of human cognition (e.g. multitasking in an office environment) facilitating the exploration, examination and consolidation of graphical user interfaces as a particularly 'user-friendly' interface type.