The strange absence of abstraction levels in designing HCI

Abstract

People process and communicate information at multiple levels of abstraction when reading, talking, solving problems, designing and interacting with computers. For example, in reading an article, actors may focus on a letter, a word, a clause, a sentence or a paragraph. At any moment, they focus on a particular level of abstraction, do something, and, under certain conditions, move back and forth to other levels until the actors achieve their goal. Not moving between levels of abstraction when necessary, decreases performance. It follows that human-computer interaction should be designed accordingly, yet there is hardly any explicit mention of abstraction levels in studies or guidelines of designing HCI. In this talk, I propose a method for incorporating abstraction levels in the design of HCI as a critical dimension of designing adaptive HCI. The talk demonstrates the ideas with examples of HCI for supporting online reading and group problem solving.