HCI stands for Human-Computer Interaction, Computer User Interface in academic words.  HCI is important because it has direct impact on the productivity of computer-based tools.  Poor HCI limits your field of vision and your ability to express.  Font design is part of HCI because a poorly designed font will surely limit the time you spend staring at text rendered using that font.

Recent mock up of digital dashboard by Rajesh Jain and Ray Ozzie's comments is inline with what I am working on: Groupware HCI.  Toughest part of designing groupware is its UI because the whole aim of groupware is to enhance group productivity and, as I mentioned above, HCI has direct impact on productivity.

Rajesh's web-based dashboard fails because

• power of dashboard UI lies with its realtime view and web pages are just not responsive enough no matter how much JavaScript you throw at it.
• a dashboard is more than just a collection of unrelated Post-It sized web pages.  Position of and relationship between each panel is critical to a dashboard's effectiveness.
• web pages consistently convey the feeling of Places and as web browsers convey the feeling of Movement between Places.  This conflicts with the Personal Gadget message conveyed by dashboards.