Semiotic approaches to user interface design
Clarisse Sieckenius de Souza, Raquel Oliveira Prates, Simone Diniz Junqueira Barbosa, Ernest Alan Edmonds · 2000
Hartson (1998) has pointed out that although people have studied interfaces and applied theories (mostly cognitive psychology) to them, and that the majority of the guidelines and principles applied have arisen mostly out of practice than theory. He claims that the HCI field, especially in real-world practice, could benefit a great deal more from theory. As the discipline whose aim is to investigate processes of communication and signification amongst agents in general, Semiotics is bound to contribute to the field of human-computer interaction with complementary perspectives, new methods and concepts, which can shed light on some of the major HCI challenges in design and evaluation. Viewing HCI as a complex human communication process, involving designers and users, and the mediation of communicative artifacts, Computer Semiotics and Semiotic Engineering, for instance, are some of the approaches in Applied Semiotics that directly address the issues bearing on human-computer interaction. The workshop aims to bring together researchers and practitioners of HCI and Semiotics and to give them the opportunity to discuss how the two fields can provide new knowledge and a new interdisciplinary research agenda in HCI.