A Reflection on Spring 2018 Human-Computer Interaction (CS345/545)

I started a narrative approach to a CS345/545 (Human-Computer Interaction) reflection yesterday, and it came out really negative. It was honest, but too negative—that's no way to be. I'm going to try again today, but with a different format, and see if I can make it both shorter and more constructive. Let's pull a trick from Sprint Retrospectives and start with...

What Went Well

Controlling scope. There's a lot that could be covered in an intro HCI class, and the conventional textbook approach sacrifices depth for breadth. Put another way, it sacrifices understanding for recognition. I wanted my course to center on a few fundamental principles, and ours ended up being Don Norman's Seven Principles of Design (from Design of Everyday Things: Revised and Expanded) and the Double Diamond design model. We also reviewed importance of model-view separation and layered software architectures, although this was not really in any more detail than I would cover in CS222. I had hoped to have more time to talk about software architectural issues, but seeing the students struggle with the other topics, I pulled back on this.

Focus on principles. Similar to the point above, I had to remind myself several times during the course that it is not really about how to design a user interface, but about the principles of human-computer interaction. There's a difference here, I believe: we could spend a lot of time on issues like font choice, spacing, the use of tools to aid in design. We didn't, though, which meant we could talk at a higher level of abstraction and not get lost in pixels and palettes.

Allow for failure the first time. The students completed a small project before Spring Break, a project that was essentially a small version of what we would do after break. It made them put the design principles into play within the double diamond context. They almost all did badly, from an objective point of view, but this was a success from a pedagogic point of view. This showed them that it's a different thing entirely to claim understanding vs. to apply knowledge in context.

Socratic Day. There was one day where I was feeling quite frustrated about my students' inability to show empathy for each other and for me, and so I ran about twenty minutes of class via the Socratic method, starting with the question, "What do you think I see?" We touched on a lot of interesting ground here. Interestingly, they did not really come up with the answer I had in mind, which was "The backs of laptops and the tops of heads." I don't think I've ever gone Full Socratic (tm) on my students before, but it's something I need to keep in mind, especially if I am feeling upset or disoriented.

The "A" Group. Despite my frustrations with the course, there was one team of guys who attended practically every meeting, most of them completing all assignments satisfactorily, paid attention and asked questions during class, followed instructions and applied what they read during class activities, and produced a good and thoughtful final project. None of them had significantly different prior experience from the rest of the class, and not all of them earned stellar grades in the prerequisite courses. This tells me that what I asked the students to do was on target for those students who were on point, if you don't mind mixing metaphors.

Many small assignments. I set up an aggressive schedule of reading and crafted in-class activities to support them. I needed to make sure students were keeping up with the pace, so I set up a series of assignments to be done before each class for the first half of the semester. This worked in terms of keeping people together: I could tell that almost all the participants in class had done the preparatory work. During Spring Break, as I reflected on what I had seen in the first half of the semester, I carried this model over to the second half as well: when there was a day that I needed students to have something particular prepared, I set up an assignment for it. The assignments were graded rather generously by an undergraduate grader, but that generosity was fine since the assignments were more about keeping up than mastery.

I learned. I think I mentioned in my course planning post that I was wonderfully surprised by the revisions in the new edition of DOET. One piece in particular that stood out, as someone interested in methodologies, was the double diamond model. I've never deployed that myself, so I figured I would use the semester to try to understand it. I gave a wrap-up presentation in the final week of classes where I explained my understanding and frustration with the model, putting it in contrast with Scrum and my spin on George Kembel's design thinking framework. I actually started planning out a blog post called, "The Double Diamond is Malarky," and in doing reading and preparation for that post, I came across a different visualization than UK Design Council's—this one from ThoughtWorks.

All the pieces fit together for me now: using this model, the iterative and incremental software development approach sits within the second diamond entirely. At first, I rejected this, since my predilection is to consider each iteration anew, with the possibility of pivoting on the problem completely. Then I realized, however, that this is exactly how I have been running my immersive learning projects! I use one semester with the Honors College to figure out what problem we can actually solve, and then that input is given to the Agile, cyclic development model of the Spring Studio course. Hooray for reflective writing!

What can be improved

One of the biggest surprises of the semester is that I was assigned to teach CS345/545 again in the Fall instead of a section of CS222. This means I have the opportunity to improve the course right away, while the ideas are fresh in my head—an opportunity for which I am grateful. Expect a "Summer Planning" post in the next few months as I sort things out. In the meantime, here are some things I can improve for next time.

Stow laptops or GTFO. That is, put your laptops away or get thine fanny out. Those blasted distraction machines are ruining our students. Attendance is not required for my class, and that's a fact I reminded them of many times. People clearly are engaged in something else and thinking that if they sit in class they will magically collect knowledge. It's ridiculous, it's infantile, and I'm done with it. The lingering question is whether or not I want to incentivize the use of paper notes or not. For example, I could offer a grade or something like an achievement for using paper notes, or I could ask them to keep a design log with their notebooks. I need to think about the logistics of this still, but one thing's for sure: the laptops are going away. 

A quick related thought: I had one guy this semester who, when I asked him and his chatty colleagues to close their laptops and join the group, did not, and instead sat in the back smugly with his laptop clearly open. The question then, is, what should I do in such a case? I don't want to play power games, that's just more juvenile nonsense that doesn't belong in the classroom. I am thinking of making a policy that I will simply leave if the policies aren't followed, which then makes it a matter of social pressure. I'm not sure how that will play out, but I feel like I need a plan so that I react appropriately.

Iterate on the final project. Now that I have a better understanding of the Double Diamond, I want to bring that out in class by having students complete short technical iterations within the context of the bigger design project. This will give them a valuable opportunity to assemble and test an artifact and get feedback about it, from both me and potential end-users. It seems simple enough, but getting this to fit into the calendar may be tricky. It's possible that a small project may not be necessary if instead we allow iteration within a bigger project.

External partnerships. Many years ago when I taught HCI with a focus on mobile app development, one of the best parts of the class was setting students up with external consultants. These were not clients but rather alumni, friends, and generous strangers who agreed to give students feedback on their work. You know how it goes, teachers: you can say the same thing a hundred times, but sometimes students won't hear it until it comes from someone else. This past semester, we were on track to have an interesting community partner for all the projects, but this fell apart in a sea of bureaucracy and red tape. As a result, the student projects were a bit "fakey". This had the immediate result that most (if not all) of the students did not conduct authentic evaluation at the end of the project. Many asked friends and family to evaluate their work, which is absolutely the worst thing to do. Setting up real partnerships would help here, as there would be someone else with skin in the game besides the students—someone with different objectives, not just getting a grade.

More check-ins on the principles. As part of the small and large projects, student teams had to submit project reports, both a draft and a final. The project reports are where students had to explain how their projects manifested Norman's seven principles. What I saw was, by and large, rationalization rather than principle-informed design. That is, students explained decisions they had already made, situating these within the principles, but it's pretty clear to me that they did not consider the principles before or while making the decisions—only after. I designed a final exam question to help students tease these ideas apart, but students who did a poor job in their project reports also misinterpreted the question itself and provided similarly superficial or unjustifiable responses. I should be able to craft additional discussions, assignments, or activities that help students frame their works-in-progress within the principles, which I hope will lead to a better understanding of them.

What still puzzles me

Graders. Since I knew I would have so many assignments, and it was going to be a busy semester, the department hired an undergraduate grader for me. She was a good student who I have worked with before and whom I trust. However, she could not attend classes, so she had a real outsider's view of what was going on. It's still a blind spot to me, if there were opportunities to give feedback to my students that I missed because she was handling the day-to-day assignments. I asked her to report anomalies to me, which she did for most of the semester and which led to some interventions, but this died off as the semester's pressure built.

Bad UIs and Lack of User-Centeredness. As I mentioned above, we focused on principles, but the fact is that some students developed some truly hideous interface designs. Some of these were bad because of design decisions that the students made, and these carried on into nonsensical UI choices; others were bad because the layout was just silly. A lot of students used JavaFX and SceneBuilder with the mistaken idea that because they have a tool to lay out elements, they must be doing it right—a myopic, developer-centered rather than user-centered perspective. The question for me, then, is whether there is a modicum of UI design knowledge that I can help students acquire that would actually help here. My intuition says "no", that if they don't have taste they cannot develop it in the middle of an already-packed semester. My intuition has been wrong before, though. The bigger question is how to get them to focus consistently and enthusiastically on the users. I am thinking of bringing in something like task modeling from Software for Use, which I had good luck with years ago, although that book is now comically dated, with examples drawn from Windows 95.

Empathy. I wrote earlier about a particular example of how one of my students failed to show empathy, but I think this is a bigger problem—as in, a really, really big problem. If you're a junior or senior in college, and you don't know how to build empathy, what in tarnation has been going on in your core curriculum and pre-college experience? What's the point of studying history, culture, or language if you cannot put yourself into someone else's perspective? If you get to an upper-level elective on HCI, and you do not know how to have empathy for others, is it actually possible to learn it? Is it my responsibility to teach it?

There's a related and troubling problem here related to student disabilities. The university rule is that students with disabilities should be reviewed by the Disability Services office, who will then develop accommodations for the student; faculty are given a form that indicates what accommodations are considered reasonable. In my experience, most of these are "Extra time on tests" or "Can take tests in a distraction-free environment." That's all well and good, but that office doesn't actually provide me the information I need about the disabilities that impact the work that I do. If I had a form that said, "Cannot empathize," well I would know I better not count such an assignment against the student—but as far as I know, that office has never produced such a form. It puts me into a bad situation where I have to guess at student disability, despite my having no training or expertise in this area. Yikes. There's a sense in which the lawyers are on my side: if an autistic student sued the university because they failed my course due to unsatisfactory completion of an empathy-related assignment, the university could say, "They didn't have an accommodation on file for their disability." This doesn't change the fact that such a thing seems impossible to have been filed in the first place. Maybe I'll check in with Disability Services over the Summer to chat about such cases.

Wrapping up

This post went much better than the previous one. It has helped me articulate some of my ideas that can feed forward into my planning process for Fall semester. Thanks for reading! As always, if you have questions or ideas, feel free to share them in the comments section below.