CSC 211: Introduction to HCI [Spring, 2025][4 Credits]
Class Projects:
Wake&Shake [website]
Contact information:
- Instructor: Dr. Zhen Bai (address as Dr. Bai)
- E-mail: zbai7 (at) cs (dot) rochester (dot) edu
- Office: Wegmans Hall 3007
- Office hour: Thu 10-11am
- Teaching Assistant: Mr. Erfan Farhadi
- E-mail: efarhadi (at) ur (dot) rochester (dot) edu
- Office: Wegmans Hall 3207
- Office hour: Wed 5pm-6pm
- Teaching Assistant: Mr. Yongsheng Yu
- E-mail: yyu90 (at) ur (dot) rochester (dot) edu
- Office: Wegmans Hall 3504
- Office hour: Fri 4pm-5pm
Prerequisites and Target Audience:
The course is suitable for undergraduate students with basic programming skills (CSC 172 - required), and mobile or application development experience (CSC 214 - desired).
Course overview:
The goal of this course is to provide an introductory overview of the concepts, principles, methods and special topics of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). This course will help students to build a frame of reference of HCI approaches and apply them in conducting design practices for real-world problems. It contains a combination of lectures, seminars and group projects. The lectures will cover origins of HCI and interaction design, user-centered design methods, usability evaluation and user experience. The seminars will be a combination of instructor and guest speaker led talks and discussions that introduce special topics in HCI, which may include Augmented and Virtual Reality, technology-enhanced learning and assistive technologies depending on the speakers’ availability. The group project will take place throughout the course and provide an opportunity for students to apply user-centered design methods (e.g., contextual inquiry, prototyping, evaluation) in designing and developing a working application or interaction technology that address authentic real-world problems.
Learning objectives:
- Understand the history, concepts, and principles of HCI
- Become familiar with user-centered design processes
- Understand cognitive, social and emotional aspects of HCI
- Become familiar with state-of-the-art categories of user interface and interaction
- Learn user requirement, prototyping, and evaluation techniques
- Obtain hands-on experience in applying HCI methods in building applications that solve authentic problems
- Obtain teamwork and presentation skills
- Obtain knowledge of special HCI topics
Schedule:
| Week | Date | Modules | Lecture |
| 1 | 1/21 | Overview | Course Introduction |
| 1/23 | HCI Overview | ||
| 2 | 1/28 | Use & Context | Usability |
| 1/30 | Development Process | User-Centered Design Process | |
| 3 | 2/4 | Use & Context | User Requirement (1) |
| 2/6 | User Requirement (2) | ||
| 4 | 2/11 | Project Brainstorm and Team Formation | |
| 2/13 | User Requirement Data Collection | ||
| 5 | 2/18 | Interaction & Design | User Interfaces |
| 2/20 | Design Prototyping | ||
| 6 | 2/25 | Prototyping Workshop (project prototyping) | |
| 2/27 | Prototyping Workshop (physical prototyping) | ||
| 7 | 3/4 | Term Project | Mid-term Project Proposal Presentation (1) |
| 3/6 | Mid-term Project Proposal Presentation (2) | ||
| 8 | 3/11 | Spring Break | |
| 3/13 | Spring Break | ||
| 9 | 3/18 | Human | Understand Human (1) |
| 3/20 | Understand Human (2) | ||
| 10 | 3/25 | Social Interaction and Collaboration | |
| 3/27 | Development Process | Evaluation - 1 | |
| 11 | 4/1 | Evaluation - 2 | |
| 4/3 | Interaction & Design | Per Ola Kristenssen (Cambridge) “Towards Systematic Design Methods for Probabilistic” | |
| 12 | 4/8 | Design Guidelines and Principles | |
| 4/10 | HCI Special Topics | Advanced Topic: AR/VR Overview | |
| 13 | 4/15 | Xu Wang (UMich) “Human-AI Collaborative Interfaces that Enable Efficient Authoring of Tutoring Systems” | |
| 4/17 | AR/VR Bodystorming Workshop | ||
| 14 | 4/22 | Zhen Bai: Embodied Learning Technology | |
| 4/24 | Term Project | Project Development/Evaluation Session | |
| 15 | 4/29 | Final Presentation - 1 | |
| 5/1 | Final Presentation - 2 |
Grading:
Homework is due midnight (11:59pm). Each day late will result in a 20% deduction (maximum 60% off).
The mid-term and final examinations will take place in the form of a term project. The project will include 2-3 students and will go through a complete cycle of user-centered design processes for an application or interaction technology that solves a real-world problem. The final course grade will be based on:
- In-class activities (10%)
- Students will take part in lecture discussion, seminar presentation, and design workshops
- Assignment and in-class quiz (40%)
- Students will complete various writing, design and analytics assignments, and in-class quiz
- Mid-term group project (10%): group presentation and report
- Final Project: 40% + 10% bonus
- Low-fidelity prototype
- Working prototype
- Evaluation
- Final presentation
- Project report
- Media: website, video demo
- (Optional) Students are encouraged to submit their work as a poster or work-in-progress paper to HCI related juried-reviewed conferences (e.g. CHI student research competition), or local, regional or national student research consortiums
Attendance:
If a student cannot attend the class due to a planned event (e.g., conference), s/he must EMAIL the instructor one week ahead of time. For unforeseen reasons (e.g., illness, family emergency), the student should let the instructor know before 9am on the day of the class. In both cases, the student may be asked to submit assigned in-classroom activities for course make-up.
Students with special needs:
- Please set up a meeting with the student disability service office and meet with the course instructor to discuss necessary accommodations within the first two weeks
Technology used in classroom
- Blackboard: formal course announcement, course information and materials, assignment submission and grading
- E-mail: Urgent communication with the instructor
- Slack: informal communications (with instructor, TAs, classmates)
- Zoom: ONLY to accommodate student’s special needs with lecture live caption, and remote attendance under special circumstances.
Academic honesty:
- All assignments and activities associated with this course must be performed in accordance with the University of Rochester's Academic Honesty Policy. More information is available at: www.rochester.edu/college/honesty
- For individual course assignments, students can discuss with classmates for questions related to the assignments. However, all written reports and coding for individual projects must be done independently, represent your own work and not be completed in collaboration with others.
- For the group project, students are permitted and encouraged to share project materials with group members and write the report as a group effort. Therefore, it is important to understand that you are responsible for the academic integrity of the entire report, including contributions of other group members. To avoid potential problems with academic honesty (and to more fully engage in the project), you should be involved in various aspects of writing the report, and you should verify that citations are correct and that all text is accurately cited and not plagiarized. At the end of the project report, you are required to provide a clear statement of the contributions of each member of your group to the group activities. If you feel that problems are developing in your group project, you should come to see the instructor early, so that I can provide general guidance to group members to set your activities on the right course. As you are responsible for the entire assignment, it is incumbent upon each of you to ensure the integrity of the project.
- Sharing/posting course material online without notifying/obtaining permission from instructors is strictly prohibited.
Classroom requirement
- No mobile phone usage is allowed in classroom (except for certain in-class activities).
- Please be respectful to the instructor, TAs, guest speakers, and all peer students.