Advanced Interaction Design (2015)

(Course last given in spring 2015)

Main Course topics: Demographics and design, User Experience (UX), Personas, Responsive Design, Design Patterns, Prototyping, wireframing using Balsamiq, Qualitative and Quantitative Evaluation of Interaction Designs, Ethical evaluation procedures, Descriptive and Inferential Statistics, SPSS data analysis, Speech and Natural Language Interfaces, Conversational Agents, Multimodal Interfaces, Human-robot Interaction design.

Assessment: 50% exam and 50% coursework. All students sit the same exam. Masters students are expected to demonstrate more extensive critical awareness and understanding of the course material in their coursework project (see below). Coursework will be marked at 80% for the final report, 10% for the presentation, and 10% on a self-reflection report about the group collaboration process (see below).

Coursework -- group project: design / analyse / develop / evaluate (see below) a novel user interface that uses multiple modalities for interaction (i.e. two or more of: graphics, speech, audio, tactile, gesture, movement, ....). For example: use speech on Android, or OpenDial or IrisTK, to design a new spoken dialogue system; use a Leap Motion or Kinect or a touch-table to design a new gesture-controlled interface; combine this with the Oculus Rift virtual reality system; use the NAO or FurHat to create a Human-robot interaction system; design a location-based mobile app that tells users (using speech) what amenities are nearby, perhaps based on a user model, or plays location-based songs or ..... be creative!

The project theme for this year is interfaces for the `smart home', see e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_automation and the video links below!

Equipment that you can use:

MYO gesture control armband
Oculus Rift
Google Glass
NAO torso
FurHat head
Very large touchscreens
Touchtables
Lots of Android mobiles / tablets
Leap motion - fingertip / hand gesture recognition
Kinect (V1 and V2)
Eyetrackers

Your project must cover several of the following aspects:

design: explain and motivate possible interaction designs for your chosen interface, including user demographics, personas, user experience, design patterns. Compare and contrast at least 2 possible designs;
analyse: based on research literature and previous approaches relevant to your interface, write an analytical review of the main problems and research issues relevant to your design problem;
develop: use some of the tools listed below (or other relevant software, or your own code) to develop a working prototype of your interaction design;
evaluate: using either a working prototype or a functional mockup of your design(s), perform a contrastive evaluation of 2 or more possible interaction designs, using qualitative and/or quantitative methods. Analyse your results for statistical significance.

Possible group-member roles:

* = essential role (some team member(s) must do this!)

(many people will have several roles, and most projects will not have all of these roles):

Implementation / engineering / programming
Testing
Evaluation with users *
User Experience
Experimental Design *
Project Management *
Leadership *
Literature Review *
Document preparation /report writing *
Presentation *
Demographics
Heuristic evaluation
User consultation groups/ focus groups
Participatory design
Data analysis / statistics *
Graphic design
Information Architecture
Prototyping
Ethical Issues *
Overall Concept *

Deliverables: (submit all of these via email to the lecturers, with email header: Name, group name, deliverable name)

Project presentation (week 9, 10% of coursework): group delivers a 10 minute presentation to the class describing your chosen design problem and your project plan and progress.
Research paper (week 12, 80% of coursework): write up your group project and results in the format of a 6-page conference paper submission, using the CHI template (use either the latex template, or word template): see edited Word template attached at bottom of this page!
Individual self-reflection report on your experience of the group process (week 12, 10% of coursework).

This is a short (1 page) report answering the following questions:

How did you plan and manage your own work within the group?

To what extent did you independently solve problems and take initiative within the group?

How did you take responsibility for your own and other’s work by contributing effectively and conscientiously to the work of your group?

How did you actively maintain good working relationships with group members?

Did you lead the direction of the group project or any aspect of it?

Critically reflect on your roles and responsibilities within the group, and the roles and responsibilities of the other members.

Guest lectures: NLP -Arash Eshghi; UX - Stephen Denning; HRI ?? ; visit to User Vision

Research space and equipment: Google Glass, Oculus Rift, Leap Motion, Kinect v2 dev kit, NAO robot torso, FurHat animated robot head, various eyetrackers, etc

Lectures / labs / class plan:

Tuesday classes: 14.15- 15.15 in EM 336, Friday classes 10.15-12.15 in EM 307 (for weeks 7-9 10.15 class is in MGB22)