Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and User-Centered Design are multidisciplinary areas. HCI is the intersection between the social and behavioral sciences, on the one hand, and information technology, on the other. User-Centered Design combines areas of anthropology, cognitive science, human factors, and graphic design.
This course is designed to teach students how to create programs that are intuitive
for the user's needs. The material teaches students ethnography techniques borrowed
from anthropology for gathering data about the users and the way they approach
their work. It teaches ways of grounding their design decisions in the data
they collected through modeling and visualization. It helps students recognize
ways of being creative with their design ideas. And it teaches them about interface
evaluation and iterative refinement through paper prototype testing with real
users.
In addition to theoretical information via lectures, students get hands on experience
with in-class assignments and a semester long project. A key aspect of User-Centered
Design is learning how to communicate and observe real users. The exercises
and the project provide experiences to help learn skills of interviewing and
observation. Students then model the data gathered, consolidate the individual
models to a user population, brainstorm design ideas, test a paper prototype,
and create a high fidelity prototype.
Our approach to this course includes experiencing how to work with non-technical
users who are unlikely to share the same conceptual understanding of the application.
We employ volunteers from the introductory computer science course to act as
users for the project application. This provides a rich learning experience
for User-Centered Design.