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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) | A4: Solving a design problem with a computational method |
| Oct 8 | Empirical user studies 1 | L5: Empirical research basics | 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 | 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) | A8: Behaviour modelling and prediction from interaction logs |
| Nov 12 | Human behaviour 3 | L9: Multimodal interaction | 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 |