Pick, Click, Flick! Some Stories about Interaction Techniques

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When people use technology and devices, like a computer, smartphone, tablet, watch, game console, set top box, or other consumer electronics, Interaction techniques (IxTs) are the low-level reusable building blocks out of which their user interfaces are constructed. An "interaction technique" starts when the user performs an action that causes an electronic device to respond, and includes the direct feedback from the device to the user. Examples include physical buttons and switches, on-screen menus and scrollbars operated by a mouse or finger, touchscreen widgets and gestures such as flick-to-scroll and pinch-to-zoom, text entry on computers and touchscreens, input for virtual reality, consumer electronic controls such as remote controls, game controllers, input for virtual reality systems like waving a Nintendo Wii wand or your hands in front of a Microsoft Kinect, interactions with conversational agents such as Apple Siri, Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa or Microsoft Cortana, and adaptations of all of these for people with disabilities. This talk will explain what Interaction techniques are, why they are important and difficult to design and implement, and the history of a representative example: the story of Cut, Copy and Paste. This talk will be based on Brad Myers’s university courses and his new book on this topic, see https://www.ixtbook.com

About Brad:

Brad A. Myers is the Charles M. Geschke (SCS 1973) Director of the Human-Computer Interaction Institute and Professor in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, with an affiliated faculty appointment in the Software and Societal Systems Department. He was chosen to receive the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Achievement Award in Research in 2017, for outstanding fundamental and influential research contributions to the study of human-computer interaction, and his most recent book, "Pick, Click, Flick! The Story of Interaction Techniques" won a 2025 CBI Human-Computer Interaction History Prize. He is an IEEE Life Fellow, ACM Fellow, member of the CHI Academy, and winner of 19 Best Paper type awards and 6 Most Influential Paper Awards. He is the author or editor of over 550 publications, including three books, and he has been on the editorial board of 8 journals. He has been a consultant on user interface design and implementation to over 90 companies, and regularly teaches courses on user interface design and software. Myers received a PhD in computer science at the University of Toronto where he developed the Peridot user interface tool. He received the MS and BSc degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology during which time he was a research intern at Xerox PARC. From 1980 until 1983, he worked at PERQ Systems Corporation. His research interests include user interfaces, programming environments, programming language design, end-user software engineering (EUSE), API usability, developer experience (DevX or DX), interaction techniques, programming by example, mobile computing, and visual programming.