Instructional Design

How did I design the delivery of the unit and its content?

Content & order

The course does not aim to produce experts in HCI, usability or interaction design. What I hope and try to do is to ensure that students leave the course with an awareness and understanding of the issues in HCI, and a strong commitment to usability in principle.

I have run this unit for several years, and my approach has gradually evolved. I had previously taught a unit on User Interface Design, using Visual Basic as the development medium, and had found that students tended to concentrate far more on the complexities of software development than on the principles of interaction design.

When I came to plan this unit, I considered what the design activity should be, and what the software tool should be. I am a strong believer in experiential learning, and I wanted the students to experience why HCI and usability matter, and how non-expert non-designer users of software systems react to them.

I came to the conclusion that I wanted students to have a learning experience involving real users using real systems. This is achieved by setting an assignment that requires students to design and implement a small-scale user study of a real system, for which they must enrol 'real people' as participants. The user study is the second part of their assignment; the first part is to perform an 'expert' evaluation, so that they have something to follow up and analyse further in the user study. (See the Assessment section for full details of the assignment.)

The assignment activities drive and determine the instructional design for the course. The end-point is the user-study. Before designing and implementing the user study, students need to determine what to study, so they need some analytical tools and techniques. And they need an introduction to some basic theoretical understanding underpinning the practical work they are asked to do.

The course design therefore resolves into three main components: basic theoretical underpinnings; tools and techniques for usability analysis; basic research skills and techniques for carrying out a user study.

If I had a more time - a full year's course, for instance - I would ideally follow the course as I currently run it with a second semester in which students designed, built and evaluated a system, using all the learning gained through the first semester. But with limited time available, and students with limited and varied software development skills, I have taken the view that the 'real-user' experience built in to my assessment is more valuable than requiring students to build an artefact. They do, in any event, build software artefacts of various kinds throughout their degree programmes, and I want them to experience the unpredictability of users really encountering real systems.

Delivery

My approach throughout the unit is to make use of experiential learning wherever possible. One example of this is the Research activity (see the Artefact links, to the right). Students are asked to read, consider and evaluate a published research paper which reports on a study of frustrating computer experiences. Then they are expected, in workshop sessions, to participate in a similar study. This activity both helps to prepare for the assignment work, and contributing to general course content and understanding.