Jesper Garde | Blog: Mainly about Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)

When I started this blog it was with the purpose of getting practice in writing as I had just been accepted for a place on the UCL MSc Human-Computer Interaction course. That is more than 3 years ago… I have now completed the taught part of the course and will hand in the dissertation later this year.

The course finished with a 2-week practical User-Centered Design project, followed by a 2000 word essay including a 1000-word reflection on the course as a whole.

Below is my reflection on the course, which I hope will be useful for people considering applying.

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Last week I got a tweet from a friend with the following wording:

The fact that you can put the BBC player’s volume right up to 11 still makes me smile every time.¹

The tweet immediately caught my eyes as a perfect example of many of the things I’ve been reading about lately concerning emotion and design.
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In the introduction to his book Designing Pleasurable Products Patrick Jordan writes:

Usability-based approaches ¹ to product design tend to view people as users, while products are seen as tools with which these users complete tasks. Because of this usability approaches to user requirements specifications can be limited, tending to emphasize the practical aspects of interacting with products, while paying little attention to emotional or hedonic aspects of interaction.

This builds on Jane Fulton’s idea that simply eliminating deficiencies in products is no longer enough to satisfy users. Products must elicit positive emotions when experienced, both psychologically and physiologically, thus forming a powerful emotional attachment between the user and the product (Fulton 1993).
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I’m currently preparing for my MSc in Human-Computer Interaction with Ergonomics at UCL which I’ll begin in September. As I’m slowly working my way through the introductory reading list [pdf] I’ll create some posts here to help me organise and make sense of the information.

I’ll begin with the Interaction Design Lifecycle Model as described by Preece et al., 2002 in the book Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction. The model incorporates three principles of user-centered design and four activities of interaction design.

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During the last couple of years I have gradually moved towards a more digital lifestyle. It started when I replaced my SLR camera with a digital SLR. Later I ripped and properly tagged my entire cd collection in iTunes (weeks of work, and some learnings to share in a possible future post). With so much irreplaceable content and literally years of work it is paramount that I insure myself against loss of that data.

In an ideal world I would not have to spend any time thinking about backing up my data. Everything would be stored online ‘in the cloud’ and accesible for me from anywhere on any device that supported the data format. I would trust the companies storing the data not to lose it. I believe it will not be many years until this ideal scenario is reality, but in the meantime I need an easy and automated backup strategy. Easy in terms of time and complexity to set up and automated in terms of low to zero maintenance.

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On Wednesday 20th January 2010 The Guardian came with a supplement focused on flexible working. It’s great to see an increased focus in mainstream media on the ways we organise our work lives.

My friend and former eBay colleague Azita Qadri is working with start-ups to find them high calibre part-time candidates. In 2007 she set up the company Eat Your Cake to help professional mothers balance their career and family by job-sharing. She has later specialised in part-time roles in start-ups. I did the logo development and branding for Eat Your Cake and designed and built the website. It is still one of the projects I’m most proud of.

Learn more about Eat Your Cake and how they can help you find a part-time role or job-share.

Download The Guardian “Flexible Working” supplement [pdf] from 20 January 2010