Glossary
Searchable terminology from accessibility, web standards, and related fields.
55 results found in HCI.
- Residual Category (Residual Categories)
- A concept from Susan Leigh Star describing the "other" or "not applicable" categories in classification systems — the bucket where anything that does not fit predefined types gets placed. Individuals …
- Routine Infrastructuring
- A concept developed by Bryan Semaan describing community practices through which marginalised and oppressed groups continually reconfigure sociotechnical arrangements to sustain everyday life under pe…
- Semi-Automatic Wizard-of-Oz (Semi-Automatic WoZ)
- A hybrid Wizard-of-Oz study methodology in which part of a prototype system is implemented with real automation while a human researcher (the 'wizard') intervenes only for components that are not yet …
- Sensemaking (Sense-making)
- The cognitive and social process of giving structure to ambiguous, incomplete, or unfamiliar information so that one can act on it. In HCI and information science, sensemaking is studied as iterative …
- Stage-Based Model (Stage-Based Model of Personal Informatics)
- A model of personal-informatics use, introduced by Ian Li, Anind Dey, and Jodi Forlizzi (2010), describing how people move through five stages of self-tracking: preparation (deciding to track), collec…
- Story Completer
- A design role for generative AI in storytelling, proposed by Niu, Clements, and Kim (2026), in which AI systems complete and enrich stories authored by human creators rather than generating full story…
- Supportive Empathy
- A therapeutic conversational stance in which a listener responds to another person's feelings with affirmation, validation, and gentle encouragement rather than problem-solving or interpretation. In m…
- Symbolic Interactionism (SI)
- A sociological tradition, associated with Herbert Blumer and the Chicago School following George Herbert Mead, that understands social reality as constructed through ongoing interaction: people act to…
- Tailorability (Tailorable systems)
- A design property, central to infrastructuring theory, that allows users to configure, extend, or repurpose a system after deployment to fit their local use context. Tailorability goes beyond 'customi…
- Throughput (Throughput (Fitts), Pointing Throughput)
- In human-computer interaction, throughput is a combined speed-accuracy metric derived from Fitts's law that measures the efficiency of aimed pointing movements, expressed in bits per second (bps). It …
- Unobtrusive Interaction (Unobtrusive Interfaces)
- A design orientation, associated with ambient, wearable, and assistive-technology research, that aims to minimise disruption to users' natural behaviour, attention, and social presence. Rather than de…
- User Engagement Scale (UES, UES-SF)
- A validated self-report questionnaire for measuring user engagement with digital systems across dimensions including focused attention, perceived usability, aesthetic appeal, and reward. Developed by …
- Vignette Study (Vignette-Based Method, Vignette)
- A research method in which participants are presented with short, carefully constructed scenarios describing hypothetical or realistic social situations, then asked to make judgments about appropriate…
- Within-Subjects Study (Within-subject study, Repeated-measures design)
- An experimental design in which every participant experiences every condition being compared, so each person acts as their own control. Within-subjects studies increase statistical power with smaller …
- Wizard-of-Oz Study (Wizard of Oz, WoZ Study, Wizard-of-Oz Method)
- A Wizard-of-Oz study is a research method in human-computer interaction where participants interact with a system they believe is autonomous, but which is actually being partially or fully operated by…