HCI Knowledge Units
Draft: February 21, 2022
HCI: Understanding the Users
Individual goals and interactions with others
Topics
- User-centered design and evaluation: personas/persona spectrum; user stories/storytelling and techniques for gathering stories; empathy maps; needfinding/NEEDS assessment (techniques for uncovering needs and gathering requirements (e.g., interviews, surveys, ethnographic and contextual enquiry); journey maps; evaluation methods (e.g., observation, think-aloud, interviews, surveys, usability tests). See also: Knowledge Unit on Evaluating the Design
- Physical & cognitive characteristics of the user: physical capabilities that inform interaction design (e.g., color perception, ergonomics; cognitive models that inform interaction design (e.g., attention, perception and recognition, movement, memory); topics in social/behavioral psychology.
- Designing for diverse user populations: how differences (in, for example, race, ability, age, gender, culture, experience, and education) impact user experiences and needs; internationalization, designing for users from other cultures, and cross-cultural design; challenges to effective design evaluation (e.g., sampling, generalization; disability and disabled experiences; universal design. See also: Knowledge Unit on Accessibility and Inclusive Design.
- Collaboration and communication: understanding the user in a multi-user context; synchronous group communication (e.g., chat rooms, conferencing, online games); asynchronous group communication (e.g., email, forums, social networks); social media, social computing, social network analysis; online collaboration, social coordination, and online communities; avatars, characters, and virtual worlds; culture, communication, networks, and organizations.
Learning Outcomes
Tier 1
- Compare and contrast the needs of users with those of designers.
- Identify the representative users of a design and discuss who else can benefit from the design.
- Describe empathy and evaluation as essential parts of design.
- Carry out and document an analysis of users and their needs.
- Construct a user story from a needs assessment.
- Adapt an existing design to a population with needs different from those of the initial target population.
Tier 2
- Contrast the different needs-finding methods for a given design problem.
- Conduct a user-centered design process that is integrated into a project.
- Recognize the implications of designing for a multi-user system/context.
HCI: Accountability and Responsibility in Design
– sustainability, security, privacy, trust, ethics – Understanding the impact of design decisions (SLO) – connects to intention behind design
Topics
- Value sensitive design: direct and indirect stakeholders
- Design impact: sustainability, inclusivity, safety, security, privacy, harm, and disparate impact
- Persuasion through design: assessing the persuasive content of a design
- Ethics: in design methods and solutions, the role of artificial intelligence; Responsibilities for considering stakeholder impact and human factors
- Requirements in design: ownership responsibility, legal frameworks, compliance requirements
Learning Outcomes
Tier 1
- Identify and understand direct and indirect stakeholders.
- Identify the potential human factor elements in a design.
- Develop scenarios beyond the immediately planned uses that anticipate direct and indirect stakeholders and consider the entire lifespan of a design.
- Identify and critique the potential impacts of a design on society and relevant communities to address, for example, sustainability, inclusivity, safety, security, privacy, harm, and disparate impact.
- Identify and critique the potential factors in a design that impact direct and indirect stakeholders and broader society (e.g., transparency, sustainability of system, trust, artificial intelligence).
- Assess the persuasive content of a design and its intent relative to user interests.
- Critique the outcomes of a design versus the intent of a design.
Tier 2
HCI: Accessibility and Inclusive Design
Topics
- Background: unlearning and questioning; disability studies; demographics and populations (permanent, temporary and situational disability); international perspectives on disability; attitudes towards people with disabilities; societal and legal supports and obligations
- Techniques: UX (user experience) design and research; software engineering practices that enable inclusion and accessibility. See also WCAG accessibility guidelines.
- Technologies: knowledge of features and products that enable accessibility and support development by designers and engineers (e.g. conformance to screen readers), the ROI of inclusion
- Inclusive Design Frameworks: recognizing differences; creating inclusive processes; designing for larger impact; universal design; user-sensitive inclusive design
- Critical approaches to HCI: critical race theory in HCI, feminist HCI, critical disability theory
Learning Outcomes[*]
Tier 1
- Identify accessibility challenges faced by people with different disabilities, and the associated accessible and assistive technologies used for them.
- Identify appropriate inclusive design approaches, such as universal design and ability-based design.
- Understand and identify software accessibility guidelines.
- Demonstrate understanding of applicable laws and regulations related to accessible design.
- Demonstrate a high level of skill when interacting with individuals from diverse populations.
Tier 2
- Apply inclusive frameworks to design, such as universal design and usability and ability-based design.
- Conceptualize user experience research to identify user needs and generate design insights.
- Analyze web pages and mobile apps for current standards of accessibility.
HCI: Evaluating the Design
Topics
- Methods for evaluation with users: qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods (e.g., observation, think-aloud, interview, survey, experiment); elements to evaluate (e.g., utility, efficiency, learnability, user satisfaction); presenting requirements (e.g., reports, personas); user-centered testing; functionality and usability testing; needfinding and exploratory analysis
- Study planning: setting study goals, hypothesis design; IRB (Institutional Research Board) and ethical approvals; study pre-registration; calculation of effect size; within-subjects vs. between-subjects design
- Implications and impacts of design: including environmental, material, societal, security, privacy, ethical, and broader impacts
- Techniques and tools for analysis: statistical packages, visualization tools; statistical tests (e.g., ANOVA, t-tests, post-hoc analysis; parametric vs non-parametric tests); qualitative evaluations (e.g., qualitative coding, inter-rater reliability, thematic analysis); data exploration and visual analytics; challenges to effective evaluation (e.g., sampling, generalization); data management and handling, including storage, data sharing (open science), sensitivity and identifiability considerations
Learning Outcomes
Tier 1
- Compare the constraints and benefits of different evaluative methods.
- Discuss the benefits of using both qualitative and quantitative methods for evaluation.
- List the implications and broader impacts of a given design.
- Plan a usability evaluation for a given UI (user interface), and justify choices made for study goals, hypothesis design, and study design.
- Conduct a usability evaluation of a given UI and draw defensible conclusions given the study design.
- Use a variety of techniques to evaluate a given UI.
Tier 2
- Pre-register a study design, with effect size calculations, and planned statistical tests.
- Select and run appropriate statistical tests on a batch of provided study data to test for significance in the results.
HCI: System Design
Topics
- Design patterns and guidelines: universal designs, designs under constraints (e.g., platforms, devices, resources), software architecture patterns, cross-platform design, synchronization considerations
- Design processes: prototyping techniques and tools (e.g., low-fidelity prototyping, rapid prototyping, throw-away prototyping), iterative design, participatory design, co-design, double-diamond, interaction design (e.g., data-driven design, event-driven design), 3D printing and fabrication
- Interaction techniques: input and output vectors (e.g., gesture, pose, touch, voice, force), GUIs, controllers, haptics, hardware design, error handling
- Immersive environments: virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality, XR (which encompasses them), spatial audio
Learning Outcomes
Tier 1
- Propose system designs tailored to a specified appropriate mode of interaction.
- Assess tradeoffs between universal design and constraint-based design.
- Evaluate architectural design approaches in the context of project goals.
Tier 2
- Identify synchronization challenges as part of the user experience in distributed environments.
- Follow an iterative design and development process that incorporates understanding the user, developing an increment, evaluating the increment, and feeding those results into a subsequent iteration