The Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction

This book founded human-computer interaction as a quantitative science. Card, Moran, and Newell — working at Xerox PARC and Carnegie Mellon — introduced the GOMS model and applied Fitts's law to predict how long real users take to accomplish real tasks with real interfaces. Before this work, interface design was opinion; after it, there were testable models. The Keystroke-Level Model alone gave designers a way to compare alternatives without building prototypes. Nearly every serious HCI curriculum still starts here, and the engineering psychology tradition it established runs through everything from touch-target sizing on mobile to modern A/B testing methodology. If you design or evaluate interfaces and have not read this, you are working without knowing the foundations of your own discipline.