The Gear Model of HCI Education

Manfred Tscheligi, Verena Giller

Vienna User Interface Group
Department for Advanced Computer Engineering
University of Vienna

Lenaugasse 2/8, A-1080 Wien
+43 1 408 63 66 /11
[mt, giller]@ani.univie.ac.at

Abstract

Gears are used as central metaphor for the philosophy of a coordinated HCI education program. The program consists of six parts distributed over one year. The main emphasis of all parts is on active involvement with a considerable amount of feedback and reflection.

Keywords

Human-Computer Interaction, Curriculum, HCI Education

Introduction

Educating students about user interfaces and their design and development is an unconditional necessity of any computer science curriculum. Our students will have to provide impressive keys to functionality for people fighting with real world technology. The real challenge for user interface educators is not only to provide knowledge about user interface technology but to open the mind and the heart of the students for the user of todays technology.

The central philosophy of our gear approach is based on providing insights, understanding and motivation first, desire to design alternative user interface solutions afterwards and using low level technology (programming) at the latest possible stage. We try to convince the students to introduce alternative user interface designs into a world of pseudo GUI standards. As Winograd pointed out in [1] people need concepts and skills that will not be bound to today < ~~Several meshing education gears are used to fulfill the following high level goals and constraints:~~

education for innovation should not overrule the development of skills needed in existing commercial settings (students will come into world of commercial style guides and budget restrictions)
this special education program should be easily adjustable to formal curriculum restrictions
according to a high amount of interested students (these are the good news because this program optional) there should be the possibility to filter after a certain amount of time (these are the bad news because of personal and equipment restrictions)
filtering should be based on the willingness to do a lot of work in a highly limited time and the quality of work done in HCI oriented problem domains rather than on strange selection criteria at the early beginning of the program
they should learn to work under the real world constraints of heavy time pressure with hard deadlines

EDUCATION GEARS
User interfaces are visible parts of invisible underlying technology and should be approached by direct contact and reflection in action [1]. Engaging students in the practice of design and development from different viewpoints (from the user, from the interaction designer, from the interaction developer) brings them important insights and broader understanding into different sides of the story. Self experience, action and practice should drive the education and not definitions or theoretical lectures. As our experience shows there is a migration from the "knowing common sense style student" to persons who are excited by the problems they have doing their work. We give them a lot of problems to solve each with their own characteristics depending on the stage of the program with as small as possible theoretical introduction before. The theoretical skills are further developed during the feedback cycle of the results. So they have their own problems in mind when they get further knowledge.
We are using the gear metaphor to describe the program. Each distinct part of the program is represented by such a gear. The body of the gear is the theory used throughout one course, whether as an introduction or during the reflection activities. The most important part is the practical work which build up the teeth of the gear. They drive the development of skills and so they drive the whole gear configuration. The five gears represented in figure 1 represent the following six parts: an introductry course into HCI (1), an usability engineering course (2), a part to study and present selected literature (3), a large scale project to apply existing and learn new skills (4), a course on design alternatives to support innovative project work (5) and a course on user interface implementation to support also the project work (6).
In the following we will describe the two initial education gears of our programs which all interested students are able to take part. The results from this two initial education gears are used for the filtering of the students for the rest of the program.. The description will focus on the practical exercises we used for this beginning phase of the program.
THE INTRODUCTORY GEAR
The main emphasis of the introductory part is to motivate the thinking in a certain direction. This certain direction is to think from the viewpoint of the user. Furthermore they should self experience some psychological phenomena and develop their first user interface ideas. We try to find out special skills and interest, strengths and weaknesses. At the beginning of the program our students are at an advanced stage of their computer science curriculum. Normally it is the first time they come into explicit contact with human computer communication. They have their own PC at home, so we can rely on a distributed PC lab. Therefore we were able to accept all interested students for the first two program parts. They students got exercises which they had to work on at home (on their own or within groups of 2 or 3 persons) within 4 weeks:
evaluation of real world technologies (select some part of technology, evaluate the user interface, report usage problems and propose a better design solution); rationale behind: observation of users fighting with technology (they got no specific hints how to do it)
memory test (give people lists of digits with increasing length, make people repeat the digits, observe and analyze error pattern, record the test with tape); rationale behind: demonstration of basic psychological attributes, observation and recording methodology (students got no hints)
computer games (select computers games, play games and observe users playing games, analyze what makes fun and what interaction elements are used); rationale behind: observe users and examine user interface designs
icon design (design icons for different concepts, e.g. last tramway this day); rationale behind: transform ideas into paper based drawings, find out drawing talents (we explicitly forbidded the usage of computer tools !), the icons were rated also by the students
visualization of a particular abstract process (develop paper and pencil visualization/animation for particular text out of a biology book); rationale behind: students should try to visualize, learn to use paper and pencil prototypes
metaphor design (develop metaphor and produce paper and pencil prototype for a parallel system); rationale behind: metaphor design, learn to use paper and pencil prototypes
GUI critique and "alternative" GUI design (develop written critique of common GUI <
THE USABILITY ENGINEERING GEAR
The second education gear is dedicated to the principles of usability engineering (analysis, conceptual and detailed design, prototyping, evaluation). Within three weeks the students had to apply some basic knowledge in a middle scale development project. They had to develop a user and task analysis, learn a prototyping tool (we use Toolbook running under Windows to use our distributed PC lab), developing a prototype, develop a usability test, evaluate the prototype and redesign the prototype. The more detailed lecture parts of this gear are held after the first trials to fullfill the different requirements of this project. So the students had specific questions and were able to reflect on their own work.
The three weeks were concluded by a "usability weekend" where each group (2 students) presented their own prototype. Before the presentation started some other student had to carry out a specific representative tasks with the unfamiliar system. So the designers get valuable insights into the principle that the designer is not the best user to evaluate the own system. This also gives some impressions into the quality of the evaluation work. During the presentation of the system a different group had to apply some inspection method (cognitive walkthrough, heuristic analysis) to the prototype presented in another room. The results of the inspection were reported after the presentation. At the end of each presentation session all other students had to fill out an evaluation form to help us with their ratings.

References
1. Winograd, T.: Designing a language for Interactions. Interactions, 1/2, p. 7.