Creating a realistic context for team projects in HCI

Team projects are nowadays common practice in HCI education. This paper focuses on the role of clients and users in team projects in introductory HCI courses. In order to provide projects with a realistic context we invite people from industry to serve as clients for the student teams. Some of them have a professional interest in participating in our course and define a project themselves. Another way we make projects realistic is to have teams evaluate their designs with real users. We describe how we incorporate the role of clients and users in our courses and describe our experiences. One of the results of our evaluations is that most students find it very interesting and stimulating to work with a client on a ‘real’ project from industry. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.5.2 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: User Interfaces - User-centered design K.3.2 [Computers and Education]: Computers and Information Science Education Computer science education, information sy...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: ITICSE
• Authors: Herman Koppelman, Betsy van Dijk
• Keywords: Introductory Hci Courses, ITICSE 2006, Science Education, Team Projects