My course on human-computer interaction is available over on Udemy.
I designed the materials as a fusion between the academic lectures I’ve given and the practical design skills a UX consultant needs using everything I’ve ever blogged about on this website: 101 ways to think about human-computer interaction.
In this course you will learn HCI theory and UX practice, supported by cognitive science and design theory as you journey through:
* History: Learn how and why the terms human-computer interaction (HCI), interaction design (IxD), and user experience (UX) came into common parlance.
* Computer I/O: You will consider the pros and cons of the input and output of computers from barcodes to touch screens.
* Human I/O: Your will learn about your users’ psychology with cognitive science so that you can better understand how to manage their expectations and meet their needs.
* Design theory: You will learn about familiar yet old concepts such as: ‘Form Follows Function’ (think cutlery) and ‘No Function in Structure’ (think Pinterest) along with the more buzzy: ‘The Medium is the Message’ (think marketing) which are so important in the visuals aspects of your system.
* Designing Interaction: You will learn why the desktop metaphor is as useful as it is annoying, some classic HCI techniques: Task Analysis and GOMS, and you will understand different classifications of interaction types.
* Knowing your user: You will learn some tools to capture and then summarise the users for whom you are designing.
* Defining your data: Garbage in means garbage out, so we need to be clear on what data we need, where it comes from and how we are going to use it.
* HCI Guides and Rules: You will learn all the jargon: ‘Affordances’ (does the design give me a clue as to how it works?), ‘Mimicry’ & ‘Transference’ (which do exactly what they say), ‘Internal Locus of Control’ (empowering your user) and ‘Recognition over Recall” (a concept made famous by the first graphical user interface at Xerox Parc) and pull them altogether for your own set of rules.
*UX laws and tools: You will pull together all the UX laws and tools to support your HCI guides and rules so that you can create your own framework from which to design.
*Designing your design: Here you will step through everything you have learnt so far to create a design.
*Evaluation: You will understand the different way of how to evaluate your design and create a UX strategy.
* Social media: You will learn to consider social media from the perspective of data collection, game theory, social psychology to see if your design could use social media data.
By the end of the course, you will have all the skills you need to design a mobile app or website and then think about ways to extend this using social media and big data.
Finally, you will be able speak with confidence about the interaction between people and the increasingly complex computer systems our modern culture demands, thus becoming an agent for change, yourself.
Need to know what skills you already have which make you ready to take this course? Watch the video below:
And, here’s the link again human-computer interaction.
Last updated 12/10/2024