HCI Disciplinary Commons Portfolio - Fiona Fairlie
Content Commentary
The module I teach is delivered to two cohorts of students: Applied Graphics with Multimedia and Multimedia Technologies. It is a level 3 module and both groups of students are in the third year of their degree course. However most have completed the first two years of study at further education college. These students are in their first semester of university and arrive with different degrees of knowledge of HCI. The students who are not in this position articulate from the Diploma of Higher Education in Multimedia Visualisation with Product Design and have not studied HCI before. The module thus serves as an introduction to HCI for some students, an introduction to university life for others and as both for a significant number. It is hoped that by the end of the module all students will have a broad overview of some of the fundamental concepts of the subject at a general level.
As the title of the module, Human Computer Interface Design, implies the module teaches a subset of the topics to be found in more conventional introductions to HCI. In particular it focuses on screen based presentation and does not cover CSCW or other topics in the communication and collaboration areas. It presents material in a qualitative way and only mentions formal techniques such as systems models very briefly. While it is recognised that this may leave students who wish to study the subject at a higher level at a slight disadvantage, such students are very rare with the majority of students aiming towards a design based job in the creative industries. For these students it is important to develop the practical skills which can support the development of products and which demonstrate a creative ability. An additional factor in the decision to take a qualitative approach was that it was felt that the students’ lack of mathematical background could inhibit their understanding of the material if it was presented with an emphasis on quantitative techniques.
The module takes a practical, project based approach to interface development so lectures in the first weeks of the course cover the fundamental principles of screen layout, colour, scale and typography and the development of storyboards. These aim to equip students with basic graphic design skills. This was felt necessary as some of the Multimedia Technology students arrive without any training in this area and without this input make some very basic design errors. Other lectures in the first part of the module include more conventional discussion of the various disciplines contributing to HCI with a particular emphasis on Cognitive Psychology. These lectures aim to introduce students to the depth and complexity of research underpinning the subject and to move the graphics students in particular away from a purely aesthetic approach to screen design towards a more user centred design rationale.
The next section of the module is also split into two strands: the first builds on the storyboarding introduced in the design section and expands to cover project planning and the software development lifecycle; the second explores the hardware devices and interface widgets available to contemporary designers. An understanding of both topics is necessary for anyone wishing to develop a successful interface. A couple of lectures are devoted to coding strategies and debugging. The module is not a programming one and there is not time to teach any more than the most basic principles but it is felt necessary to discuss the fundamentals of programme development as graphics students do not encounter this anywhere else in their degree programme yet are expected to develop functioning interactive applications.
The final lectures of the module introduce evaluation techniques and discuss guidelines, standards and documentation. Evaluation is discussed from the start of the module in practical sessions as it is seen to be an integral part of the design process and is implicit in the coverage of other areas e.g. use of interactive widgets but techniques for both predictive and observational evaluation are only discussed at this stage. The timing of these lectures is practical – the material is not needed so urgently for the development of the students’ practical projects as some of the other topics.
The practical project runs for most of the semester and forms a large part of the lab work for the module. Students’ are given a, relatively unstructured, brief and expected to develop an interactive, electronic prototype of an interface. They produce storyboards of their intended design in week 6 of semester, receive feedback in weeks 7/8 and develop the electronic prototype for week 12. They are expected to have their work with them at every lab session and to be able to discuss and justify their design choices.
Programming is not taught formally during the lab sessions but is addressed using a problem- solving approach. Students are expected to use directed study time to work through booklets introducing scripting techniques for the chosen authoring tool, which is Flash this year.
In addition tutorial sessions run through out the semester. These sessions aim to make the relationship between the theoretical and practical elements of the course more explicit. In the early part of semester they take the form of practical tasks e.g. evaluation of a web site later they become more theoretical requiring students to provide essay type answers to design questions.
Although a number of books are currently on the suggested reading list Interaction Design (2nd edition) is currently the “essential reading” HCI book. (Two Flash books are also listed as essential).This text book takes a process driven , hands-on approach to HCI and is thus well suited to a practically driven, project based module such as mine.
Updated: 22 April, 2008 | Site
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