Why it’s not just about Computer Science

Every year that you have attended school, computers have been increasingly woven into the fabric of your everyday life. We don’t interact with computers simply when we sit in front of their screens anymore. They are in front of our faces when we eat dinner, telling us where to go when we drive our cars, and the medium through which we express many of our relationships.

This means that we can’t dismiss the quality of our interactions with these devices as something trivial or unimportant. Computers are simply too pervasive in our lives. The quality of our interactions with computers has a direct impact on our overall quality of life.

Practically, if you write an application that people can’t use, they won’t use it. Many of the dominant companies that we are familiar with received a jump start by emphasizing core usability principles in the beginning stages of development.

Given these stakes, we need to deeply consider What is the best way for us to interact with computers? How can we quantify or capture this notion of ‘good design’? How can we build applications of our own that are designed well? In this class, you will learn about:

  1. Human-Centered Discovery: Identify design problems that can be solved using computational means. This will allow you to develop ideas that fit actual human needs.
  2. Human-Centered Design Processes: Develop a process for exploring and testing solutions to design issues. This will allow you to use research-validated approaches to creating apps that people find a pleasure to use.
  3. Research-Driven Design Solutions: Utilize existing and emerging interaction techniques to improve the way that people engage with the world around them. This will allow you to develop a design intuition - using design ideas and principles to build user-centered applications.

Finally, you will be exposed to people who are paving the way for the next-generation of HCI. Through them, I hope that you will catch a glimpse of the future, and use this information to grab ahold of trends before they emerge.

Responsibilities

Participation, Professionalism, and Critique

When the core content of a course involves people, engagement is absolutely critical. We will be doing design exercises in class, testing new software on each other, and providing critiques of each others’ work. This portion of your grade is significantly higher in HCI than some of your other courses for this very reason. Coffee up! It involves:

  • Showing up to class
  • Actively engaging in class activities
  • Actively engaging in design critique of classmates
  • Submitting good questions for our weekly visitors
  • Occasional quiz on reading/video material
  • Occasional reflection on class activities

Reading, Watching, Listening

While many HCI courses come with a standard text book, I believe that there is more than enough freely available information online.

Each week, our course schedule will contain a set of content you are asked to consume. Often this will involve short readings, YouTube videos, podcasts, or slide decks. My goal is to transform the lecture section of the course into a design studio as much as possible. While there will a lecture roughly once a week, talking through a million examples only gives you limited design capabilities. Iterating through, presenting, and critiquing each others’ designs is where you will really learn to build in a human-centered way.

Aside from internet sources, here are a few of the excellent books that we will be drawing from (I’ll link to restricted pdf excerpts). If you want to dive deeper, they are all freely available to borrow as ebooks from the WPI’s Library:

  • Designing with the Mind in Mind by Jeff Johnson
  • The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman
  • Human-Computer Interaction : An Empirical Research Perspective by Scott MacKenzie
  • Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design by Bill Buxton

I will give reading quizzes on this content.

Design Sprints | Course Overview

The core of the work in this class will fall under the broad category of “Design Modules” - worth 50% of your overall grade. While some of the following will be done entirely in class, other modules will be done in teams with more formal feedback mechanisms. Included below are a set of examples of what these design sprints might emphasize. The following list will likely change over the course of the term. Your output for each of these modules will consist of a design document

  • Airport App Design
    • Topic: Human-Centered Design Process
    • Tech: Paper!
  • Design for Others
    • Topic: Visual Design + Sketching
    • Tech: Prototyping software (InVision), HTML/CSS
  • Design for Understanding
  • Design for Fun
    • Topic: Gesture Computing + Body sensing
    • Tech: Leap Motions, Java
  • Design for Tension
    • Topic: Conversational Interfaces + Chat Bots
    • Tech: Motion.AI, javascript
  • Design for Wellbeing
    • Topic: Affective Computing + Intelligent User Interfaces
    • Tech: Affectiva SDK, javascript, CSS/html
  • Design for Another World

Final Design Portfolio

At the end of the term, each individual student will construct a website that acts as a design portfolio - linking to their work over the course of the term. In addition, you will write a design manifesto that promotes a philosophy for design, as is evidenced by your work over the term. Read more details here.

Grading Breakdown

  • Participation and Critique: 20%
  • Modules: 50%
  • Reading Quizzes: 10%
  • Final Project: 20%

Note: If a student fails any single portion of the class, it is up to the instructor’s discretion whether the student should pass the course as a whole.

Grading Philosophy

For many of you, most CS assignments that you’ve had up until this point had clear, crisply defined goals that mapped cleanly to point values. This is impossible in a course that relies on design. Simply checking off each of the TODOs on an assignment does not necessarily mean that you’ve created something that is easy and compelling to use.

  • Design Document Rubric: A majority of your assignments will use this rubric. Rather than simply ask “Did you do this?”, there will also be the question of “Did you do this well?”. This often translates to “Did you successfully apply the concepts we learned in class to this assignment?”. For example, if you build an app that is functional but breaks many design heuristics… that is not a successful application in this class.

  • Peer Evaluation: Many of the assignments that you complete will include some kind of peer evaluation. Usability isn’t a set of knowledge that one single person owns. Instead, software that is usable and works for one person may not for another. We will be critiquing each other’s work throughout the term using the framing of I Like, I Wish, What if from Stanford’s design school.

  • Group Work: Group work can be challenging. As a result, in each group project, you will submit a brief assessment of you and your classmates’ work. At the end of the term, I may use these assessments to reweight the group portion of your grade (either positively or negatively).

Late Policy

The core of the design cycle relies on feedback. If you do not complete something on time, then it offsets the entire cycle. In a real job, you must have something to present to your client. I expect the same from you. As a result, I will not accept late assignments. While special circumstances may warrant an extension, failing to complete an assignment in time to present it or get feedback will result either in a 0 or a grade of no more than half your final grade on the the assignment.

If you cannot complete an assignment, you should turn in whatever work that you have completed along with a reflection on the assignment (Why couldn’t you finish it? What was harder than you expected?).

Special Accommodations

If you need course adaptations or accommodations because of a disability, or if you have medical information to share with me that may impact your performance or participation in this course, please make an appointment with me as soon as possible. If you have approved accommodations, please request your accommodation letters online through the Office of Disability Services student portal. If you have not already done so, students with disabilities who need to utilize accommodations in this class are encouraged to contact the Office of Disability Services (ODS) as soon as possible to ensure that such accommodations are implemented in a timely fashion. This office can be contacted via email: DisabilityServices@wpi.edu, via phone: (508) 831-4908, or in person: Daniels Hall 124.