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Now that I am finished with my studies and earning the M.S. in Computer Science from Georgia Tech, I wanted to create a series of reflection posts about my journey. This will be a series of posts discussing each class individually. Maybe it will help you make a decision? Who knows, but here we go!
Human-Computer Interaction
This ended up being my very first class that I took in this program in Spring 2024. I was not prepared for the busy-work required in this class, which is very typical for Dr. Joyner’s classes. Every week, there were multiple things to turn in. Very first assignment was CITI Training to get certification to be able to conduct research correctly. After that, it was onslaught of assignments, projects, quizzes, tests, and of course peer-reviews to earn participation credits.
Interesting things about this class
This class started with history of early human-computer interactions related to computing technologies. The invention of mouse, keyboard, and screens. Then it went deeper into how we interact with various different technologies on the daily basis. The way we interact with the phone, or table, or even electronics inside a car, everything is designed to make the user interfaces and experiences easy to use and for them to be practical as well.
The class has taught me a great deal about designing proper UI/UX designs. Anything that we’re developing, we need to keep in mind who the user is. Using Don Norman’s Gulf of Execution and Gulf of Evaluation, we can asses the mental gaps a user must cross to use whatever system or program we design.
The projects in this class came in two parts. The first was an individual project where we were tasked to design either a new system or upgrade the UI/UX on an existing system or app to improve usability based on research and assessing user interactions throughout the development cycle. My individual project was improving the existing Apple Podcasts app to make it more intuitive and easier to find what you are looking for.
The group project was pretty much the same thing, except now we had to work with a group on a more complex project. For the group project, my recommendation is to find and recruit people on the class discussion forums rather than be paired automatically. Starting early will give the group more time to brainstorm ideas to put forth.
Not so fun things about this class
I mentioned before that the biggest gripe with this class was the amount of busy-work. While the peer-reviews were interesting, I felt like that was a lot of time spent reviewing other’s work and make comments to satisfy class participation need. Towards the end, it felt more like a chore than learning.
The quizzes in the class were designed in such a way, that they expected specific answers in a short form to write out a few paragraphs answering and explaining our reasoning. The first quiz I didn’t do so well because I wasn’t sure what to expect. Once I knew how to answer these based on feedback provided, the next series of quizzes were much easier.
Same with the two tests, while it was nice being able to use open-book and open-notes for them, the questions were designed in such a way that it was easy to lose points if you didn’t read the responses carefully.
Final words
All in all, I thought this was a great course to start off the journey. Thought me enough about UI/UX research and design, that I’m finding issues with many things and looking at ways to improve upon them. I highly recommend this class for anyone interesting in proper user interface and experience designs.