Overview
The course provides an introduction to the field of human-computer interaction, emphasising the central role of the user in system design. Through detailed case studies, students will be introduced to different methods used to analyse the user experience and shown how these can inform the design of interfaces, systems and technologies. Furthermore, students will learn to use computational tools and models of human capabilities to create interactive systems.
In a practical project, students will build on the lectures and design an interactive system from the ground up. This will include needfinding, ideation, prototyping and finally implementing a small interactive system based on manual design and with the aid of the learned computational tools
For further and extended readings, the recommended book for this course is Human-Computer Interaction by Dix and Finlay. It is available at ETH Store Polyterrasse. For further readings on models of human capabilities and computational interaction, we recommend the book Computational Interaction by Oulasvirta, Kristensson, Bi, and Howes, which is available in the ETH network.
Learning Objectives
The goal of the course is that students learn how to design, prototype, build and evaluate interactive systems that gather and process information on users’ state, task and environment, and apply algorithms to adapt the interface to optimize for performance and usability.
Schedule
| Wk. | Date | Content | Slides | Project/Exercise |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 16.09. | Introduction to course |
Lecture |
No session.Form Groups, Submit Project Preferences. List of projects (PDF) |
| 2 | 23.09. |
UX/ UCD / Design thinking |
Lecture
Exercise-Introduction Exercise |
Project Kickoff.Weekly Exercise |
| 3 | 30.09 |
Guest lecture: Creaholics |
Exercise |
Weekly Exercise |
| 4 | 07.10 |
Affordances / Prototyping / Heuristic evaluation |
Slides Exercise |
Project Idea Presentations.Weekly Exercise |
| 5 | 14.10. |
Experimental Design: Analyzing User Experience |
Slides Exercise |
Weekly Exercise |
| 6 | 21.10. |
Introduction to statistics (Guest Lecture) |
Lecture held by Chat Wacharamanotham, University of Zurich.
Slides Exercise |
Weekly Exercise |
| 7 | 28.10. |
User Modeling |
Slides Exercise |
Weekly Exercise |
| 8 | 04.11. |
Computational design: Input decoding |
Slides Exercise |
Deliverable: Study Report.Weekly Exercise |
| 9 | 11.11. |
Computational design: assignment problems |
Slides |
Weekly Exercise |
| 10 | 18.11. |
Visual perception, search & attention |
Slides Exercise |
Weekly Exercise |
| 11 | 25.11. |
Computational design: Meta heuristic / Applications of ML in HCI |
Slides |
Weekly Exercise |
| 12 | 02.12. |
Computational design: Xiaojun Bi |
Slides |
Weekly Exercise |
| 13 | 09.12. |
No Lecture |
Exercise |
Weekly Exercise |
| 14 | 16.12. |
Final project presentation |
Project/Prototype Presentations |