Abstract
Long before the advent of personal computers, the Internet and smartphones, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) was already a concern at the heart of some of the visions that helped forge modern computing, whether personal or professional. However, the design and study of "interactions" are still often considered secondary in system design, with priority often given to the development of functionalities rather than the means to use them.
This situation has gradually improved, notably with the advent of tactile devices (smartphones and tablets) or entertainment devices (game consoles) for which the argument of "simplicity" of use has dethroned that of intrinsic power. Naturally, this has helped to popularize and democratize access to technology. But one consequence is, in our view, a relative impoverishment of the possibilities offered by these technologies, which are paradoxically more powerful than ever. By masking complexity rather than helping to master it, and by nurturing the myth that with these devices it's easy for anyone to do a lot without effort, the tendency is to sacrifice the potential of the IT tool and the performance of users for speed of handling, without enabling more advanced, more powerful and perhaps more rewarding use for the user.
This balance between simplicity of use and power of the tool is a difficult compromise to find, and in our view it is one of the challenges and a major difficulty of HMI: to observe and understand the sensory and psycho-motor, cognitive, social and technological phenomena brought into play during interaction between people and systems, in order to improve this interaction and guide its design to "encapacitate" users. Ultimately, the aim is to enable them to do what they would be unable to do without the tool, even if this requires a certain amount of learning on their part.
