On Fri, Mar 6, 2009 at 12:15 PM, Petra Bennett <petra.benn...@sheridanc.on.ca> wrote:
> Can someone perhaps identify some of the key trends in the field and > how they are affecting the knowledge and skill requirements of the > profession? > > I appreciate your thoughts on this! Hello Petra, Here are some ideas for you based on my experience teaching HCI related courses in the Boston, USA area. 1. Prototyping/ideation methods. There has been some debate on this forum, but putting aside, a solid course on techniques for generating ideas, examining those ideas from different perspectives, and evaluating those ideas. Things that the course might include range from braindrawing/sketching to workflow models to storyboards to wireframes to interactive prototypes etc. 2. A survey of design principles (visual, interaction, human factors) 3. Persuasive principles. This is becoming a popular topic and the main book on this in the HCI area is B.J. Fogg's book on Persuasive Technology. Persuasive is important now for almost every product. This would merge social psychology with product design 4. Interviewing skills. This is a fundamental skill for understanding our users, stakeholders, etc. If you are an anthropologists, you get many chances to practice, but a course that mixes practice with theory would be great. Many HCI schools give basic interviewing skills short shrift. 5. Widget Wisdom. This would be a short course, but after 30 years or so of GUIs being around, many designer/developers make fundamental mistakes in the choice of widgets and how the attributes of the task, user, and environment interact and affect what widgets we put forth in our designs. Every week in this forum, there are debates about bad calendar objects, poor selection mechanisms, etc. 6. Quantitative wisdom and looking closely at numbers. I get so tired of getting the "5 users is enough" thrown at me when the number of participants is a function of the complexity of the interface, the tasks presented to the user, the size of the database (small versus millions of items) and understanding the various types of sample that we employ (often our sampling is convenience). There are a number of books out that get into cognitive biases that affect our beliefs and interpretations (the work of Kahneman and Tversky and others on things like the "availability bias" and the "fundamental attribution error". 7. The politics of interaction design - a case study approach of different political problems and possible solutions 8. Designing for the very small (iPhone) and the very large (multiple large monitors or HD TV or huge panels for nuclear power plants) Those are a few ideas that come to mind. Chauncey ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... disc...@ixda.org Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
