Human-Computer Interaction I: Fundamentals & Design Principles

This course takes you through the first eight lessons of CS6750: Human-Computer Interaction as taught in the Georgia Tech Online Master of Science in Computer Science program.

In this course, you’ll take the first steps toward being a solid HCI practitioner and researcher. You’ll learn the fundamentals of how HCI relates to fields like user experience design, user interface design, human factors engineering, and psychology. You’ll also learn how human-computer interaction has influence across application domains like healthcare and education; technology development like virtual and augmented reality; and broader ideas like context-sensitive computing and information visualization.

You’ll then dive into the fundamentals of human-computer interaction. You’ll learn three views of the user’s role in interface design: the behaviorist ‘processor’ view, the cognitivist ‘predictor’ view, and the situationist ‘participant’ view. You’ll discover how these different views of the user’s role affect the scope we use to evaluate interaction. These perspectives will be crucial as you move forward in designing interfaces to ensure you’re considering what goes on inside the user’s head, as well as in the environment around them.

You’ll then learn the gulfs of execution and evaluation, which determine how easily the user can accomplish their goals in a system and how well they can understand the results of their actions. All of user interface design can be seen as taking steps to bridge these gulfs.