Glossary
Searchable terminology from accessibility, web standards, and related fields.
55 results found in HCI.
- Augmented Feedback (Extrinsic Feedback)
- Feedback provided by an external system - visual, auditory, haptic, or multimodal - that supplements the intrinsic sensory feedback a learner receives from their own body during a motor task. Augmente…
- Closed-loop Interaction (Closed-Loop Feedback, Perform-Assess-Adjust Cycle)
- An interaction pattern in which a system continuously observes the user's action, evaluates it, and returns immediate feedback that shapes the next attempt, producing an iterative perform-assess-adjus…
- Cognitive Artifact (Cognitive Artefact)
- An artificial device — physical or digital — designed or appropriated to maintain, display, or operate on information in ways that support human cognitive performance. The term was codified by Don Nor…
- Confederate (Research Confederate, Study Confederate)
- A person who plays a scripted role in a research study while appearing to participants as a naive participant, bystander, or user. Confederates allow researchers to observe how true participants behav…
- Counteractive Frictions (Counteractive Friction)
- A concept introduced by Ly et al. for the deliberate, strategically produced disruptions that marginalised communities generate to contest hegemonic infrastructures — petitions, protests, Human Rights…
- Counterventions (Countervention)
- A concept introduced by Rua Williams, Louanne Boyd, and Juan Gilbert for reflexive interventions in HCI and design that unsettle ableist norms by shifting focus from individual deficit to exclusionary…
- Crip HCI
- An orientation within human-computer interaction that brings crip theory and crip technoscience into the methods, design practices, and evaluation frameworks of computing research. Rather than asking …
- Critical Computing
- An umbrella term for HCI and computer-science scholarship that interrogates the values, power relations, and social consequences of computing technologies rather than taking their benefits as given. C…
- Critical Technical Practice (CTP)
- A research stance, articulated by Philip Agre in 1997, in which technologists reflect critically on the assumptions built into their own systems while continuing to build. Critical technical practice …
- Designing with Friction (Friction by Design)
- An HCI design stance, associated with Matthias Korn and Amy Voida, that argues for deliberately introducing friction into interactive systems to surface politics, provoke reflection, and enable democr…
- Embodied Experience (Embodied Interaction, Embodiment (UX))
- The dimension of user experience that arises from the body's sensory and kinaesthetic encounter with a system or environment — motion, vibration, balance, proprioception, ambient sound, and felt pace …
- Embodied Skill Learning (Motor Skill Learning)
- A view of learning in which acquiring a skill - such as a sign language gesture, a musical performance, a sport movement, or a rehabilitation exercise - depends on coordinated bodily action rather tha…
- Execution Gap (Gulf of Execution)
- From Don Norman's model of human-computer interaction, the distance between a user's goals and the physical actions required to achieve them using a given system. A system with a wide execution gap fo…
- Feminist HCI
- An approach to human-computer interaction research and design articulated by Shaowen Bardzell that brings feminist theory, values, and methods into HCI practice. Feminist HCI foregrounds pluralism, em…
- Fitts's Law (Fitts Law)
- Fitts's law is a predictive model of human movement that describes the time required to rapidly move to a target area as a function of the distance to the target and the target's size. Widely used in …
- Help-Seeking (Help seeking behavior)
- The deliberate process of asking for, searching for, or otherwise obtaining assistance to complete a task, learn a feature, or resolve a breakdown. In accessibility contexts, help-seeking is often sha…
- Human-Nature Interaction (HNI)
- A research area within human-computer interaction concerned with how people perceive, access, and engage with natural environments, and how technology can mediate that relationship. HNI draws on envir…
- Implicit Interaction (Implicit Input, Implicit Human-Computer Interaction)
- Implicit interaction refers to user input that the system infers from natural behaviors not explicitly performed for the purpose of issuing commands, such as gaze, gait, posture, physiological signals…
- In-Situ Deployment (In-Situ Study, Field Deployment Study)
- A research methodology in which a functional prototype or product is installed on participants' own devices and used in their everyday environment over days, weeks, or months, rather than in a control…
- Information Foraging Theory (IFT)
- A theory proposed by Pirolli and Card describing how people seek information by adaptively optimising for maximum information gain with minimum effort, analogous to animal foraging. Key constructs inc…