Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) is about how people interact with computers. Computers and the programs they run work best when they are designed with the user in mind.
At HushWebs, we believe that the best way to understand the reader is to know his or her psychology. And over the last few decades psychology has learned a number of principles of learning and cognition.
Humans learn within certain limitations, limitations set by both biology and the brain. People pick up information within the contraints set by the hardware of their brains. These constraints need to be understood and leveraged by the designers of human - machine interfaces, of which the Web is the most exciting and most recent.
We like to emphasize certain basic principles discovered in HCI that are relevant to the design of web sites.
Among these are: the attentional limit set by working memory, the existence of top-down processing in the brain, the selective nature of perception, and the use of natural categories in thinking. Click on any of the items to the left to learn more.