Course outline
What is HCI?
It has to do with quality of design from the user’s perspective
The study of interaction between people and digital systems
“Designing interactive products to support people in their everyday and working lives”
What HCI is not
Making the interface look pretty
Only about desktop computers (and that goes for computing as well)
Something you do if you can’t program
Something that would be nice to do but usually there’s no time for it
Learning outcomes
Explainfundamental concepts in HCI;
Carryout a range of different types of user study and usability study;
Produce different types of low-fidelity and mid-fidelity prototypes;
Explain the entire design lifecycle, and implement a complete user-centred design process including user studies, prototyping, and
evaluation;
Critically assess different methods and approaches in HCI; and be able to provide such critique in applied settings;
Describe implementation, and justify approach to, user-centred design processes for a range of real-world scenarios.
Textbook
Rogers, Y., Sharp, H. and Preece, J. (2007) Interaction Design: Beyond Human
Computer Interaction, 2nd. Edition Wiley & Son.
(My slides based on theirs)
Other books
Dix,A., Finley, J., Abowd, G., and Beale, R. 2004 Human-Computer Interaction (3rd Ed.). Prentice-Hall,
Inc.
Benyon D, Turner P, Turner S. Designing interactive systems. Harlow, England: Addison-Wesley;
2005.
Shneiderman, B. 2005 Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer
Interaction.
Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc.
McCracken, D. D., Spool, J. M., and Wolfe, R. J. 2003 User-Centered Web Site Development: a Human-
Computer Interaction Approach. Pearson Education.
Why do we need HCI?
Why do we need HCI? The following is a true story. I haven't even bothered to change any of the
details.
1. The developers were really enthusiastic about .NET technology but they couldn't persuade management to re-
write any of the existing products using it.
2. The developers went off and put together a general, all-purpose platform with data management capabilities. It
was so general that it could have housed almost any kind of products, including ones far outside of the range
offered by
the company. It used every .NET feature, including remote databases. (The developers may have thought that they
were working for Microsoft.)
development platform with data management capabilities. It uses all of the latest .NET features.
4. Management asked, could it help customers manage their data? Sure, said the developers. It manages any kind
of data.
5. The new product got a catalog number and product manager to manage it and promote it.
6. After five years in development and three years in the market, the product was canceled. No problem with
existing customers being upset about the cancellation; there weren't any!
How to tackle the problem?
Need to take into account:
– Who the users are
– What activities are being carried out
– Where the interaction is taking place
Need to optimise the interactions users have with a product
– Such that they match the users activities and needs
Relationship between ID, HCI and other fields
What do professionals do in the ID business?
interaction designers - people involved in the design of all the interactive aspects of a product
usability engineers - people who focus on evaluating products, using usability methods and principles
web designers - people who develop and create the visual design of websites, such as layouts
information architects - people who come up with ideas of how to plan and structure interactive products
user experience designers - people who do all the above but who may also carry out field studies to inform the
design of products
Key points
ID is concerned with designing interactive products to support people in their everyday and working
lives
ID is multidisciplinary, involving many inputs from wide-reaching disciplines and fields
ID is big business even after the [Link] crash!
A key concept in ID is the user experience
