• 094745 - ADVANCED USER INTERFACES: INTERACTION

OVERVIEW

Computing has now gone beyond conventional devices, involving digital artefacts that are constantly carried on by people, embedded within appliances, vehicles, walls, furniture, and pervasively used in most human activities. Multimedia information are displayed on large and small displays, embedded in the physical space or in wearable miniaturized devices like smart watches or eyeglasses. Users can communicate with devices using gestures, body movements, speech, or manipulating physical objects.

Thinking “out of the box” and understanding human needs is crucial to exploit the full potential of these novel technologies and to develop ground-breaking interactive applications and services. This course will stimulate this attitude and will provide students with technological and methodological know-how that will facilitate their becoming carriers of innovation in the ICT arena.

In this course you will learn:

• a set of interaction paradigms “beyond the desktop” (mobile, motion-based, touch/touchless, tangible, robot-based), understanding the rationale and the “vision” of each paradigm, design principles, and main application domains.
• general methodologies of Human Computer Interaction for requirements, design, and prototyping, and how to apply them to design innovative interactive applications
• up-to-date implementation technologies to develop interactive applications that offer novel services and advanced user interfaces
• systematic evaluation method to assess application quality for a User eXperience (UX) perspective

The learning approach is mostly project-based while the teaching format comprises ex-cathedra lessons, industrial seminars, practical exercises and a supervision of project work. Industrial seminars will involve representatives of major worldwide ICT players (including Google, Microsoft, Nokia, Intel) as well as small start-ups producing interactive technologies and services.

The course is organized in 2 main parts.

In the first 2-3 weeks of the semester, the course will provide the methodological and technological knowledge related to advanced user interfaces, through lectures, demos, and discussion of research or industrial projects. The rest of the course is devoted to project activities interplayed with additional lessons on specific topics. Project activities will benefit of the regular tutoring and supervision by the teacher and her teaching assistants. Examples of students' projects developed in past years can be found in the course website http://hoc13.elet.polimi.it/aui_interaction/

Industrial seminars will take place during the whole semester.

CONTENTS

The course will cover 3 main subject areas:

• Innovative Interaction paradigms. Various interaction paradigms “beyond the desktop” are presented: Physical manipulation (interaction with “smart” interconnected physical objects that are digitally enhanced with sensors and actuators , e.g. Arduino); Multitouch interaction on large and small displays; Touchless full body interaction (Microsoft Kinect, Leap, and Intel Perceptual Computing); Human-robot Interaction. Each paradigm is discussed from different perspectives: rationale/vision, enabling technology, development tools, and design principles.

• Development process of interactive application. The main activities and tasks involved in the development process of interactive applications are discussed as well as the methods and tools to perform them: requirements elicitation (Goal oriented approaches); design (scenario based approaches);prototyping (sketching approaches); evaluation (heuristics and empirical methods)

• Experimental Research in Human Computer Interaction. User-basedexperimental research is crucial to understand human needs and requirements for a service-to-be, to generate new design ideas, and to evaluate an interactive artefact (either a prototype ro a deployed system) in terms of quality of its intended users. Basic concepts and methods of experimental research are discussed, including: research questions; dependent/independent variables; between v.s. within-group design; qualitative vs. quantitative data; data gathering techniques (observation, surveys; interviews; focus groups; automated data collection); data analysis; reliability and validity

Further details can be found in the course website http://hoc13.elet.polimi.it/aui_2013/

A very useful pragmatic manual addressing all major topics of interaction design

Most of the book content is online, where it is integrated with useful resources.