M873 is a postgraduate module which you can take either as a standalone or as part of various MScs in Computing. I took it for professional development reasons: having realised that my real passion in Web work is designing and building usable interfaces, I wanted to get a stronger theoretical background in the area.
The course is designed to be practical — although it provides an overview of key concepts in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), it always has an eye to how these would be applied outside of academic discourse. There are three course books covering the various iterations of the user-centred design process: requirements, design and evaluation.
Personally, I found the design book and related assessment most enjoyable. You need to produce three Tutor-Marked Assessments (TMAs) for the course, and these are all focussed on a particular system you have chosen to look at. I chose a section of a website at work to look at, mainly because I was getting funding from work to do the course, but also because I hoped it would give me the opportunity to implement any design changes I came up with. You could choose any system in theory, from a DVD player remote control to an existing website.
The TMAs were incredibly time-consuming. The course notes suggested you should take around 10-15 hours for each one, but in practice I (and others I spoke to) took far longer: at least twice of this. Which brings me to my biggest complaint about the course. The overall mark is based on the TMA marks and the exam marks. You need to get 40% in both to pass which I feel isn’t a fair weighting: after all you might spend between forty and sixty hours on the TMAs and you get just three hours in the exam hall.
I thought the exam expected a little too much: both in the amount of questions you were supposed to answer (four in three hours) and the amount of lists and tables you were expected to learn by heart. If the course must be assessed by an exam, I’d prefer to see the course weighted more in favour of the assessments or at least fewer exam questions.
The material ranged from incredibly interesting and engaging (aspects of the design book, how to “sell” UCD to your organisation) to the far dryer, verbose and repetitive (most of the first book and parts of the last). The materials were also outdated: the course was last updated in 2000, although there were some revisions in 2004. This means screenshots of websites in Netscape 4 and photos of virtual reality gloves (yeah, so they turned out to be the future of interface design didn’t they). But, it should be borne in mind that this is not a technical course but a conceptual and design course and as such is technology-agnostic so will not date as quickly as say, a course on Web development. You could pretty much do the whole thing with a pen and paper. For my part I prototyped with Photoshop, HTML and Balsamiq Mockups.
I wouldn’t say the course was enjoyable as such: it was very demanding and there were many concepts to try and understand. However, it was very useful and although it’s not going to guarantee me a glowing future as a usability professional in itself, I’ve already employed many of the concepts and ideas in my day-to-day work. Would I recommend it? Yes, but with caveats: I think the course materials could be slimmed down and I do think the coursework / exam mark ratios should be addressed.
It’s also worth bearing in mind how you will cope with distance learning: it worked well for me, fitting in with other commitments, but you do feel you’re on your own and there were few opportunities to bounce ideas off other people or to get a tutor to go over a particular issue. There was a course forum, but this seemed to die about a month into the course. One of my co-students set up a Facebook group which saw a little more action, but not much.
As a postscript: it should be pointed out that apparently this course is not going to last much longer in its current format. It’s been long overdue for review, so I think that it’s not going to be offered after this year or next (but please don’t take my word for it!).
Tags: UI, blog-post, education, interaction design.