One year as a UX/HCI student: A guided tour of required courses

Siyu (Pansy) Jia
Aug 31, 2018 · 6 min read

During my first year back in grad school, I immersed myself in a brand-new field while trying to connect my past with my future.

MSI, which stands for Master of Information, is a two-year master’s program offered by the University of Michigan (UM)’s School of Information. I just finished my first year as an MSI candidate and applied what I have learned to a three-month internship this summer. Looking back to the 9 courses that I completed in the past two semesters, I am kind of surprised at how much knowledge and experience I have gained (maybe because I am changing my career field and currently in the first half of a learning curve). In the meantime, I realize there are still a lot of topics of study that I’d like to dive into.

UM’s Schoo of Information is located in the North Quadrangle (Credit: UMSI Instagram)

The MSI program in UM is designed based on career pathways. All the courses, either required or selective, are supposed to build pipelines to three major tracks/specification: Data Science, Digital Archives and Library Science, and User Experience Research and Design. In the first year of my study, I mainly focused on the UX track, and also got exposure to data analytics since some courses under this track are interconnected with advanced courses as pre-requisites. From my understanding, research, design, and programming (or people, design, and technology) are the key components of UX as well as HCI (the difference between them is that the former is more work-oriented and the latter is more academic-oriented; or, the former is a practical application of the theories and principles of HCI). I classified the courses that I have taken into these three categories. The following is my reflections and personal feelings on each course.


Research

Final presentation of the Contextual Inquiry course (Credit: Prof. Kentaro Toyama)

1. Contextual Inquiry and Consulting Foundations: A project-based course teaching qualitative research methods. In this class, we, as a team of four, worked with a real client (a majority of them were different divisions and departments of the university and others were small- to medium-sized companies/organizations in Ann Arbor, ours was the UM’s Office of Academic Innovation) and helped them address some information related issues. The professor prepared his lessons meticulously and I learned a lot from multidisciplinary teamwork as this is a required course for all master’s students regardless of academic tracks. However, I have to admit that a student’s experience with this course largely depends on team coherence.

2. Fundamentals of Human Behavior: In this class, we learned quite a lot of concepts and theories of cognitive psychology that are relevant to product or information system design. It’s really helpful and fascinating to know that how people perceive a product or system through their senses, such as sight, hearing, and touch. For example, I got to know how to calculate the ideal size of a target (e.g. button) on an iPhone screen after taking this course. It’s a coincidence that I went to an exhibit named “Our Senses: An Immersive Experience” at the American Museum of Natural History in New York this summer, and ended up finding out that I was already familiar with most of the content thanks to this course.

3. Statistics and Data Analysis: A fundamental statistics course teaching probability and regression analysis. We used R to create regression models and make graphs. The teacher tried to connect abstract regression-based models with concrete cases, but I still doubt if I can apply what I learned from this course to the real world.

In-class usability testing exercise

4. Needs Assessment and Usability Evaluation: Another project- and team-based course. We learned and practiced a variety of user research methods in this course, including comparative analysis, survey, heuristic evaluation, usability testing, etc. I was grateful that I worked with three other smart classmates and a professional and detail-oriented client, the user research team of Yahoo Finance. The course was fast-paced as every two or three weeks we needed to complete a report based on extensive field research. The good thing was, the client always read our reports carefully, gave us their feedback and suggestions, and they did take some of our advice for product improvements at the end.

Design

Making paper prototypes in the “Interaction Design” class

5. Introduction to Interaction Design: This course focuses on interaction design methods and design thinking. I got to know the differences and connections among various design methods including Interaction Design, User-centered Design, and Participatory Design… from this course. Also, thanks to this course, I experienced the entire process of product design, from conducting user research, creating personas, to wireframing and prototyping, based on a self-defined project.

6. Graphic Design and Visual Communication: The format of this course is a combination of lectures, labs and office hours. Through attending labs and some office hours, I gained practical software skills, particularly about how to use Adobe Ps and Ai. As for the lecture sections, the teacher intended to teach us how to “read” designs in a social and cultural context. However, I sometimes felt impatient as I couldn’t get the gist of what he said, and I really hoped they could have introduce the guidelines and best practices of some popular design languages, like Google’s Material Design and Apple’s HIG.

Programming

7 & 8. Programming and Intermediate Programming: The most widely used programming language in our school is definitely Python, which might because it is easier to adopt for beginners (the backgrounds of UMSI students are quite diverse) compared with Java, JavaScript, C++, and it is also getting more popular in the industry. These two programming courses aim to prepare students for more advanced courses such as Data Mining and Information Visualization. Rome wasn’t built in a day. I started to learn Python from almost zero and felt fulfilled that I could complete a final project independently that was composed of 800 lines of codes covering API, web scraping, data processing and interactivity, as well as database (SQLite) at the end of last semester.

9. Design of Complex Websites: Another fundamental programming course that prepares students for building and deploying responsive websites. HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, and jQuery are the languages used in this class. We spent two-thirds of the time studying programming skills and building a personal website. In the rest of the time, we looked deeply into the standards and principles of web accessibility, an issue that has been increasingly emphasized by both big companies and public organizations.


My summer internship, working as a Product Design Intern at Sift (a SaaS startup), gave me another perspective to evaluate the importance or value of these courses. Overall, Contextual Inquiry (1), Needs Assessment and Usability Evaluation (4), and Interaction Design (5) helped me a lot to take initiatives and solve problems during the internship.

2017 IPD Trade Show (Credit: Tauber Institute)

This internship has also impacted my course plans for the coming academic year and even my future job search. I will continue deepening my knowledge and experience in tangible/physical product design and applied business analysis. I am planning to take three or four courses this semester (depends on if I can participate in an extracurricular project) including:

AR/VR Application Design - We will create two mini-projects, which focus on AR and VR respectively, using prototyping tools.

Information Visualization - In this class, we will be learning more about JavaScript, D3, data and image models.

Integrated Product Development - Students from Information, Business, Engineering, and Art & Design schools will form a team to design and build a product which will compete with other products through both online and physical trade shows!

I feeling pumped for the learning ahead and cherish every bit of my school days.

Siyu (Pansy) Jia

Written by

Product/UX Designer. Former HCI student at University of Michigan-Ann Arbor.

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