New Studies
I’ve neglected my blog for almost two months but it’s because I was busy having a great relaxing winter break. I’m one week into the spring semester and finally have my classes finalized. I thought I’d run through them and share some of the topics I’ll be studying from now until May.
HCI Project
The HCI master’s project teams have been formed. All the projects are excellent this year with clients from Google, Microsoft, GE Healthcare, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, SAP, SRI and NASA. My project client is GE Healthcare, and I’ve very excited about our team. Our project will be to examine how doctors use Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS). Our task will be to investigate the workflow around this system and design a new user interface for the system to support and enhance the work while reducing repetitive stress injuries. Many doctors are beginning to use a computer for extended periods of time and this coupled with the massive amount of images they have to sort through is causing new problems. Our clients are flying in Friday for our kickoff meeting.
Interface and Interaction Design
Right now I should be feverishly working on my homework assignment for this class. Our first task is to analyze controls we use frequently and then do a redesign, presented as a poster. I’ll need to get right back to this once I’m done writing this.
This class is taught by John Zimmerman who was one of my clients for the HCI methods lab last semester. John is an excellent designer and I will no doubt learn a ton in this class. The other projects in this class will include a mobile information service design, the design of a web site to give a user a personalized experience, and an digital audio player the design of which stresses an emotional connection with the user. I’m looking forward to all the new skills I’ll learn about design from John and my peers.
Online Infomation Design
I’m taking Online Information Design as an elective to gain additional exposure to web programming and usability methods. For this course, we will be redesigning a portion of the Carnegie Mellon Electrical and Computer Engineer website. Our work will involve learning new methods of discovery and will hopefully produce another project which I can pull from for my portfolio and interviews.
Programming Usable Interfaces
This elective is required for students who don’t have a programming background. I’m taking it to gain more experience creating graphical user interfaces and iterating based on user feedback. I also don’t have much experience using visual basic, and although I don’t see this being a heavily valued language, it is a good language for creating user interfaces quickly. This course also has two projects in Flash. I’ve did some Flash and ActionScript programming years ago, but I think Flash has had about 100 version since then so I don’t expect this to carry me too far.
Ubiquitous Computing
The UbiComp area of research has always fascinated me. There were a few CS master programs that I looked at when applying to grad school where I there is a good chance I would have chosen it as my focus. But of course I’m so glad I chose to study HCI where I can learn about so many related fields. Enough about me. The UbiComp course is being taught by Jason Hong. I had Jason for Software Architecture for UI last semester. Like that course, UbiComp will be mostly project and research readings. We’ll also each get the chance to give at least one lecture and help further develop the course for future years. The project is completely open to any UbiComp area of design or can be more implementation focused. If you have any cool ideas, let me know!
Other Stuff
These five courses are sure to keep me sufficiently busy. My other goals for the semester are to finish off my online statistics course, put the polishing touches on my portfolio, and last but not least keep a consistent workout routine. My friends Aruna and Madhu promised to get me in the gym at least twice a week so I don’t become such a dweeb.