Workshops and Courses on Human-Computer Interaction

The Industrial Design Centre in IIT Bombay was the first, and still one of the few institutes in India offering formal courses in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) design. India has had a large IT industry but there are not enough HCI professionals in India with the appropriate skills to match the needs. For IT services companies HCI skills are important to move up the value chain and to maintain an edge over competition. For IT product companies, HCI design methods and techniques are an absolute must as they listen to the voice of the customer. (see white paper on Institutionalizing HCI in India and a book chapter on India in the book Global Usability)

To help bridge the gap, we organize these short term courses and workshops for working professionals:

• Introductory Workshop on HCI Design
• Workshop on Contextual Inquiry
• Workshop on Usability Evaluation
• Workshop on Software Engineering and HCI

A couple of times each year, 'open' workshops are organized in the IIT Bombay campus - professionals from any company and faculty and students from academic institutions can attend. At other times, 'in-house' workshops are conducted on invitation.

In the past, participants came from these organisations.

[Current courses, Past courses]

Current Courses

Top, Past courses

Introductory Workshop on HCI Design

This workshop intends to help beginners understand the issues involved in the design and evaluation of Human-Computer Interaction and to apply them in real projects. The workshop gives an introduction to the concepts and principles, followed by practice in the design process and techniques for evaluation of interactive products.

After attending the workshop, participants should be able to undertake design of interactive products. Those who are already involved in interaction design will be able to improve quality and usability of their design, and will understand the theory behind what they do intuitively. Those from software engineering will be able to make the software development process more user-centered.

This workshop needs at least four, and optimally five days.

Day I	Day II	Day III	Day IV	Day V
Human cognitive processes	User models	HCI heuristics	Usability evaluation	Software Engg. and HCI - Design process revisited
Conceptual model, Human errors	Goals of HCI	HCI heuristics	Gestalt Laws	User tests
Layers of user Experience	Design process	Personas and scenarios	Interface design, Prototyping	User tests
Project initiation	User and task analysis; Defining product goals	Personas and scenarios; Conceptual model	Heuristic evaluation	Lessons learnt; Institutionalizing HCI
Contextual inquiry technique	Case studies / papers	Case studies / papers	Case studies / papers	Wrap-up

Current courses, Top, Past courses

Workshop on Contextual Inquiry

The goal of this workshop is to teach participants techniques of interviewing users and identifying and analyzing needs, problems and opportunities. Those involved in user requirements analysis and specification will benefit from this workshop.

Contextual Inquiry (CI) is an ethnographic interview technique that works well within the deadlines of commercial projects. In this workshop, we use CI to interview users, but also draw upon other interview techniques where appropriate. We then analyze the interviews and document the findings as observations, insights, problems, design ideas and work models. We consolidate our findings across users by building an affinity diagram and consolidated work models. At the end of the workshop, we convert all the findings into a design brief and capture user requirements.

After attending the workshop, participants should be able to conduct contextual inquiry, document findings and convert them into user requirements and a design brief.

This workshop needs at least three, and optimally four days.

Day I	Day II	Day III	Day IV
Sutras of contextual inquiry	Flow and sequence models	Consolidation and affinity diagram	Affinity diagram
Alternate interview techniques	Artifact, culture and physical models	Contextual inquiry practice III	Affinity diagram
Project brief	Contextual inquiry practice II	Interpretation session II	Consolidating relevant work models
Contextual inquiry practice I	Interpretation session I	Interpretation session III	User requirements and design brief
Sharing session I	Sharing session II	Interpretation session IV	Lessons learnt, Workshop wrap-up

Current courses, Top, Past courses

Workshop on Usability Evaluation

The goal of this workshop is to teach participants techniques of usability evaluation of interactive products. Those involved with design and quality assurance of interactive products will benefit from this workshop. The workshop gives an introduction to the concepts and principles, followed by practice in usability evaluation techniques of heuristic evaluation, user tests and card sort.

After attending the workshop, participants should be able to evaluate interactive products in different stages of development and find usability problems.

This workshop needs at least three, and optimally four days.

Day I	Day II	Day III	Day IV
Conceptual model, Human errors	HCI heuristics	User tests	Card sort
User experience	Heuristic evaluation	Planning user tests	Planning card sort
User models, Goals	Heuristic evaluation	Executing user tests	Executing card sort
Problem Statement	Debriefing	Analysis	Analysis and report
Modeling users, User and product goals, Personas	Writing expert review, Recruiting users	User test report, Recruiting users	Lessons learnt, Workshop wrap-up

Current courses, Top, Past courses

Workshop on Software Engineering and HCI Overlap

IDC is planning a series of workshops where we will invite professionals from Indian IT companies to share their experiences towards working in the overlap between software engineering and HCI. The experience may be shared in terms of a case-study that illustrates one or more of the following:

• Defining 'boundary objects' that can be understood and used by professionals from both disciplines.
• Merging best practices and techniques that emerged from the two disciplines and developing shared 'boundary techniques' that can be realistically used in the industrial context.
• Making all these work in the specific business model deployed in the Indian industries - particularly distributed / offshore development.

More details on this workshop.

Current courses, Top, Past courses

Past Workshops / Courses

Current courses, Top, Past courses

 
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