Course: CS-C3120 - Human-Computer Interaction, 10.09.2019-09.12.2019

Course home page

NEW: There is a page in https://mycourses.aalto.fi/mod/page/view.php?id=461416 that provides links to useful reading materials for the exam.

As computational systems have moved to become pervasive parts of our lives, it becomes even more important to consider how they can be best designed to be useful and useable by people (or "users"). But what is a "user", how do we understand what they want, and how can we design user interfaces that are effective and efficient for them?

This course covers the foundations of Human-Computer Interaction - the study of how computer systems can be designed to support the needs of the people who we intend to use them.

Course book, teaching format, workload, grading: See the syllabus

Prerequisites: This course is designed for 3rd year students. Students are expected to be aware as the most typical software engineering process models (e.g., agile and iterative development), and have ability to do small programming tasks related to one lecture and its weekly exercise (using Python).

We warmly welcome you to learn human-computer interaction!

Antti Salovaara, lecturer
Helen Marton and Miska Nurmi, teaching assistants

Lecture schedule


Date	Theme	Lecture	Assignment of the same week
Sept 10	Human-centredness in system design	L1: Human-centred computing + Course practicalities	A1: HCI activity timing
Sept 17	Human behaviour 1	L2: Task analysis	A2: Hierarchical task analysis of a phone task and a comparison to a user's mental model
Sept 24	Interface design 1	L3: User interface (UI) prototyping (guest lecturer Aqdas Malik, Aalto SCI Strategic usability research group)	A3: Analysis of an UI and sketching its improved version
Oct 1	Interface design 2	L4: Computational design (guest lecturer Antti Oulasvirta, Aalto ELEC User Interfaces group). Note: PDF size 97 MB.	A4: Solving a design problem with a computational method
Oct 8	Empirical user studies 1	L5: Empirical research basics and A4 feedback and correct solutions	A5: Controlled experiment with one participant. This assignment will produce data that we will analyse together in Lecture 6.
Oct 15	Empirical user studies 2	L6: Experimental research and SPSS data+script for re-running the analysis in the lecture	A6: Conducting an interview-based requirements engineering study. This assignment will produce the data for Assignment A7.
Oct 22		Exam week - No lecture	Exam week - No exercise
Oct 29	Empirical user studies 3	L7: Interpretive research	A7: Finding patterns from interview-based data
Nov 5	Human behaviour 2	L8: User modeling (guest lecturer Jussi Jokinen, Aalto ELEC User Interfaces group) and Feedback for Assignment 7.	A8: Behaviour modelling and prediction from interaction logs
Nov 12	Human behaviour 3	L9: Multimodal interaction and Feedback for Assignment 8.	A9: Multimodal analysis of an app for bicycle messengers
Nov 19	Interface design 3	L10: Mobile computing and context-aware computing	A10: Prototyping two UIs for a music player app and planning a test for choosing between them

Announcements Forum
General discussion Forum
Use this forum for issues that are relevant to everyone in the course.

Otherwise (e.g., if you want to ask about your assignment's grading), contact the teachers directly: a) Use MyCourses's message service: use the speech bubble icon in the page's top-right corner and search for Antti Salovaara, or b) Send email to antti.salovaara at aalto.fi.