alexis hope

This quarter I taught HCDE 418: User Experience Design, a project-based course that serves as my department’s introduction to behavioral research and human-centered design methods. Yesterday was the last class of the quarter and my students gave presentations on all of the work they have done over the past ten weeks. And it was a lot of work: in teams of four, the students interviewed potential users, conducted additional kinds of inquiry (secondary research, diary studies, behavioral observation, etc.), came up with a bunch of designs, did a competitive analysis on existing products and services, narrowed down their ideas to create a prototype, and evaluated their prototype to uncover usability problems. I’m exhausted just writing about all of the work they did!

The teams came up with a pretty diverse array of ideas and prototypes, including: a tablet-based recipe scrapbook to support family heritage and memory-making, a web app for collaborative music listening, a game-like mobile app for fostering teen financial independence, a lightweight portable keyboard for mobile devices, a design for a hologram-based interface aimed at combatting homesickness, a redesign of the university student web portal, and a web app to support the work practices of stay-at-home parents.

One thing I have really appreciated about my students is how they draw their intellectual strength from their compassion for others. I have been continuously impressed by the sophistication with which they talk about their research, and their commitment to understanding how values are embedded in design. For example, one of the teams spent the quarter working to design a tool to support the work practices of stay-at-home parents, with the goal of increasing the visibility and value of domestic work. In pursuit of this, they read up on Feminist HCI, reached out to a variety of communities of stay-at-home dads, and interviewed local parents.

We celebrated the end of the quarter with orange juice, doughnuts, and one final sketching critique!

I’m looking forward to seeing more from this group of students.