Designing the Human Computer Interaction: Trends and Challenges

Interaction between humans and machines is being increasingly recognized as a crucially interesting dialogue that requires modeling, design and evaluation in order to build software systems usable in any form (Web applications, groupware, mobile and ubiquitous systems, etc.). Lots of resources and efforts are being devoted to this task, being the focus of the research community in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). The present special issue contains a selection of the ten highest-quality papers presented at the 7th International Conference on Interacción Persona-Ordenador (IPO), which stands for Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) in Spanish and was called Interacción’2006 for short. This conference took place in Puertollano (Ciudad Real, Spain) on November 13th-17th, 2006, and was organized by the CHICO research group from the Universidad de Castilla – La Mancha (Spain). Each year this conference is promoted by the Asociación para la Interacción Persona-Ordenador (AIPO), the Spanish Human-Computer Interaction Association. In its seventh edition this conference has become a multidisciplinary forum for the discussion and dissemination of novel research on Human-Computer Interaction.