MSCS3301: User-Centered Research and Evaluation

Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) is an interdisciplinary field drawing on psychology and the social sciences, computer science, engineering, and design. Professionals in this field use diverse methods and tools to understand, improve, and create technology that harmonizes with and improves human capabilities, goals, and social environments. This course is an introduction to user-centered practice in HCI. The first half of this course covers the pre-design part of the UX lifecycle. It covers key methods to understand the target user classes and identify the user’s goals and main tasks. It also introduces contextual inquiry, contextual analysis, needs and requirements extraction, and design-informing modeling. The second half of this course covers usability evaluation, covering techniques to evaluate and measure the interface usability in both qualitative and quantitative ways. It will also cover the complete evaluation process, starting from preparation, to running the user study session, to analyzing the data, to writing the evaluation reports on the findings that speak to the user’s needs. The course will cover standard or popular evaluation methods/techniques in the industry, including web analysis using A/B testing, controlled experiments, Common Industry Format (CIF) usability testing, and Software Usability Measurement Inventory (SUMI).