Instructor

Ming Yin

Office: LWSN 2142B
Email: mingyin [AT] purdue.edu
Office Hours: By Appointment

Teaching Assistant

Amy Rechkemmer
Email: arechke [AT] purdue.edu

Course Description

The goal of this course is to teach students how to design useful and usable interactive systems. This course is highly interactive and project-based. Topics that will be covered in the course include user-centered design lifecycle and basic principles, how to gather, analyze and present data for interaction design, how to account for human's cognitive, social, affective, and behavior issues during the design, etc.

Course Schedule

See the calendar page.

Grading

• Participation: 10%
• Weekly individual/team task: 60% (5% each week for 12 weeks)
• Project milestones: 30% (Milestone 0: 2%, Milestone 1-3: 6% each, Milestone 4: 10%)

Project

This course is centered around a semester-long, team-based project. Through this project, students will get first-hand experience of applying user-centered design principles and methods in creating a high-fidelity prototype of an interactive system that aims at solving a real-world problem.

The keyword for this year's HCI course project is pandemic. Students are asked to indentify new challenges that the pandemic poses to how people live, study, work, travel and socialize, and design prototypes of interactive systems that better support people in the post-pandemic era.

Students will be asked to form teams of 3-5 to complete the course project together. The course is structured in a way that in each week, individual students and/or the team is asked to complete some project-related tasks. Completing these tasks in a timely fashion will ensure that the team's design progress is on track and can deliver project milestones on time. Students will be asked to submit the oucome of these tasks either via BrightSpace or record them in their design journal. Here is a tentative list of weekly tasks:

• Week 2: Individual project ideas
• Week 3: Complete ethics training, form project team, and create design journal
• Week 4: Draft interview protocol
• Week 5: Revised interview protocol and first-round interviews
• Week 6: Second-round interviews and interview analysis
• Week 7: Initial design ideas via storyboard
• Week 8: Paper prototype initial version
• Week 9: Paper prototype revised verson and draft evaluation protocol
• Week 10: Improved paper prototype and evaluation interview
• Week 11: High-fidelity prototype initial version, and cognitive walkthrough
• Week 12: Draft quantative evaluation protocol
• Week 13: Revised evaluation protocol and quantative evaluation

The teaching team will remind students of the weekly tasks via the class Slack channel. These weekly tasks will be graded on completeness.

In addition, each team is asked to submit five project milestones:

• Milestone 0: Project team and topic
• Milestone 1: Needsfinding deliberable
• Milestone 2: Low-fidelity prototype deliverable
• Milestone 3: High-fidelity prototype deliverable
• Milestone 4: Project video and final report

More detailed instructions on project milestones can be found in the guidelines for each milestone.

Prerequisites

No prerequisites are required for this course. Knowledge with web/mobile programming and software engineering is welcome.

Textbook

The primary text of the class is:

• H. Sharp, J. Preece, Y. Rogers (2015). Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction. John Wiley & Sons.