Syllabus

Human-Computer Interaction

This course welcomes students from all majors (even without programming background), covering hospitable design of apps, websites, and other digital products. You will learn how to discover needs, prototype interactive solutions without programming, and test those solutions with people. Possible additional topics: inclusive design; intelligence augmentation with AI. No prerequisites.

2 credits, 7 weeks, 3 65-minute sessions per week (19 total meetings)

Objectives

Calvin graduates who successfully complete this course will be people who:

  • Enrich how organizations discuss and do interaction design
  • Encourage and empower investment in accessibility, transparency, accountability, etc.
  • Advocate for the needs of diverse users in the design process
  • Build products that are usable and useful
  • Continually improve themselves and their designs through feedback

Graduates develop these professional dispositions: as an HCI practitioner, they are:

  • Empathetic. able to understand and appreciate the perspectives of others, especially those who are different from themselves.
  • Inventive, creatively adapting past practices to audience needs.
  • Meticulous to ensure that their products are usable and useful
  • Open to Feedback, willing to learn from others and improve their work
  • Team-Oriented, able to work effectively with others to achieve a common goal
  • Adaptable, able to work with changes in technology, audience, and context

Concrete Objectives

Students who successfully complete this course will show that they can:

  • Conduct a user-centered design process, including needfinding, prototyping, and usability testing
  • Give and receive feedback on designs
  • Update designs based on feedback
  • Identify and critique potential impacts of a design on direct and indirect stakeholders to address concerns such as privacy, security, and accessibility
  • Apply universal design and ability-based design principles to create inclusive designs

Core Questions

  • What values do / should our designs reflect?
  • How can we design for people other than ourselves?
    • How can we make space for others’ perspectives in our design process?
    • Can we make designs that work for people with different abilities and backgrounds?
  • How can we improve our designs based on feedback?
    • How can we learn about our design and our users with prototypes that are easy to make?
  • AI systems can be wrong; how can we design interfaces that use them?
  • How can we give and receive feedback that improves the final product?

To Succeed in this Class

You’ll need to have frequent and substantial interactions with people who aren’t like you in ways that substantially affect their lives. If you don’t already have these interactions, this class could be an excuse to seek them out. For example, you could volunteer at a local organization, build new relationships in communities you might already be a part of (e.g., church, living group, sports team), or find a job that puts you in contact with people of different life stages, physical abilities, cultural or linguistic backgrounds, etc.

Key Takeaways

  • You are not your user.
  • Make many designs.
  • Put it in front of people as soon as possible.
  • Iterate.

Projects

You will do a design project in a team throughout this class. See the project description for more details.

Topics

Our two main topics are:

  1. User-Centered Design Process: Steps to go through that help you design for people other than yourself.
    • Needfinding, Contextual Inquiry, Storyboards
    • Rapid Prototyping, Iterative Design
    • Usability Testing & Heuristic Evaluation
  2. Design Principles: What we know about how people perceive, think, and act, and how we can use that knowledge to design better
    • Affordances, Metaphors, Conceptual Models
    • Universal Design and Ability-Based Design

Throughout, we will also practice giving and receiving feedback on designs.

Calendar

Subject to change!

Activity Queue:

  • Storyboarding and Journey Maps
  • Personas
  • Point of View statements
  • Affordances
  • strengths and limitations of usability testing methods
    • challenges (sampling, artificial situation, …)
  • Perception, attention, recognize/recall
  • Layout, color, animation
  • Motor performance testing activity
  • Universal Design / Ability-Based Design, Situational impairments activity
  • Accessibility audit of a website
  • Design for inclusivity (e.g., gender): GenderMag
  • Persuasion vs Dark Patterns
  • Value-Sensitive Design

Policies

  • Attendance is mandatory. We only have 19 class meetings, and most of our learning will happen in class through interactive activities. If you must miss a class, please let me know in advance and we can think hard about how we might be able to make up for what you missed.
  • Active participation is expected.

Assessments and Grading

Throughout the class, we will collaboratively develop a rubric for student performance in this class. At the end of the course, you will turn in:

  1. A self-assessment, based on the rubric
  2. A collection of evidence to support that self-assessment, primarily composed of a portfolio of your work from the course.

Evidence of your learning can include:

  • Design exercises during class
  • Project deliverables
  • Specific peer feedback

Acknowledgements

This course draws on materials from: