Software Atelier 2: Human-Computer Interaction

This Atelier combines some important ingredients to help students get a better understanding of their future profession as ICT experts. It starts from an introduction to ethics that investigates the many ways and venues ICT can be used maliciously, focuses on responsibilities and proposes ethical solutions. The course moves on to introduce the concept of user centred design to produce usable, useful and used tools. The different stages from ideation to paper prototyping are covered in theory and practice. In the second part of the course students can focus on and take a critical approach in assessing what makes an interface usable, used and useful. In fact, by putting theory to good use in practice, the last part of the course will see students engage in group work to deliver a project where they combine their newly acquired programming skills (from Fundamentals in Programming 2) with their ability to design ethical, usable, useful and enjoyable interfaces.

REFERENCES

We will refer to material from seminal books and relevant web sites. 

• The UX Book: Process and Guidelines for Ensuring a Quality User Experience; Rex Hartson and Pardha Pyla; Morgan Kaufmann, 2012, ISBN: 0123852412.
• Don't make me think! : a common sense approach to Web usability; Steve Krug; Berkeley, Calif : New Riders Pub.2006.
• The Design of Everyday Things; Donald A. Norman; New York: Basic Books. 2013
• The Evidence-Based User Experience Research, Training, and Consulting web site by the Nielsen Norma group: https://www.nngroup.com