Tag Archives: uclic

UCLIC Term 1 is almost over – Lessons Learnt

I’ve learnt a lot over term one, but that has also left me with a lot of questions.

Here are some general things that I can recall at the top of my head (it’s been a long week)…

  • Bringing practice and academia together isn’t easy and can lead to contrived situations where we have to imagine what it’s like to do things in the corporate world
  • There are over 100 usability evaluation methods, and I’m assuming these are mostly from the HCI research community – I don’t think all of them are applied in the working world
  • A solid grounding in theory does help a lot in practice, but maybe too much theory isn’t good
  • There’s a lot of emphasis on the UK HCI-ergonomics industries, but what about abroad? I believe there’s a sizable community in Asia (Hong Kong, India, etc.), and I don’t feel the impact of the US-based UX industry here in the UK.
  • It’s always important to attend practice seminars, where people from industry give talks and students get to engage in exercises that illustrate take away lessons (e.g. perform costing for a project proposal)
  • Joining the UPA as a student member and attending their events have been beneficial and insightful for me

Growing pains

Someone once said that the more you learn, the more you realize how much you don’t know – and I think that’s really true. There’s so much stuff to learn and it’s impossible to cover it all within a span of one year. And at the same time, good usability doesn’t come instantly and builds on good practice and experience (and hence experienced usability practioners get paid much more).

I regret not spending enough time to read. It’s one of the things on my priority list for the holidays, and I need to cover at least 10 books back to back, really fast – both for the course and for my usability interest. I put my name down for the London UX bookclub, and I’m hoping to join the inaugural meeting slated for February ’09.

Usability isn’t always = to innovation

Taking stock of my experiences over the last few months, I explicitly remember how Cooper’s “About Face 3” was really the turning point for me. But even before that when I was starting out with BT 3 years ago, there was a lot of hype and talk about innovation (not just in BT, but everywhere).

For some reason, I had considered usability and innovation somewhat synonymous, and I realize it’s not always the case. There have been times where our lecturers made it clear to us that innovation, while commercially beneficial, isn’t always a direct application of HCI or ergonomics.

And I think this is what makes “the industry” look quite chaotic at times, because there are so many people coming at this from so many different places. There’s never ‘one right answer’, and as usability/ux/hci/ergonomics people, we’re always having to say, ‘it depends‘.

And I think that UCLIC has done the right thing to emphasize on the learning process, or something they call “reflection” (which Kevin Cheng also observed about UCLIC about a few years ago, albeit somewhat negatively).

More to come…

I’m not quite done with the term just yet, lest I decide to pack my bags and go for a long holiday. Two papers are due January, and there’s tons to catching up to do. One of the papers involve evaluating usability evaluation methods (yes, evaluation methods that get evaluated) in measuring visitors’ experiences of a Zoo website, which I think will be fun.

The UCLIC Experience

I’m only about a month into the UCLIC program, but I thought I’d pen (key?) down my overall impressions about it first, and come back later to fill in the blanks. The whole point is that postgraduate education is quite often a very personal choice, and that students often choose based on very different factors.

How I got here

So, I’ll explain a bit about how I got here. When I started off half a year ago, I wasn’t quite sure I wanted to do this. My plan was to get some UK exposure, more specifically in London. I had been applying to a few British companies to see if they would sponsor my relocation, but it became increasingly difficult. I was also presently working with a large British company, but hopes of getting relocated within the company was bleak.

I started thinking about doing a Masters when I went to a UK education fair organized by the British council. Not many universities were offering programs related to usability, human-computer interaction, interaction design or innovation. The few who did were Middlesex and City University, and I do not know why UCL was not represented on that day. I knew very little of UK universities.

My initial research on City’s program got me excited, but upon further research I found out that UCL was offering a very similar program, albeit at almost twice the price. This was when it started becoming hazy for me. How different was City’s program compared to the offered at UCLIC?

Up till now, this is one question I cannot answer completely. There is great lack of information regarding this field in the UK, and I suppose the US fares a little better but I didn’t want to go back to the States.

City University HCI vs UCLIC HCI-E

On the surface, City U’s HCI program focusses more on the working man’s objectives. It offers a whole set of modules focussed on very professional objectives such as requirements gathering, systems specification, multimedia, with less focus on theoretical or analytical parts of the subject (design theory, cognition, etc.)

UCLIC’s HCI-E program offers more breadth – allowing you to evaluate a variety of different aspects in order to draw good conclusions on a particular HCI or E (for Ergonomics) related problem. The inclusion of Ergonomics implies that UCLIC is not just about web usability. In fact, this year they’ve introduced a module on Affective Computing, which takes a look at computing from the aspect of emotion.

I chose UCL because I needed more from the analytical and reflective parts than I did from the practical and professional parts. At the same time, UCL being ranked 9th in the world meant I had some bragging rights, if at all.

The UCLIC Way

UCLIC takes a very pragmatic approach in getting you bridge the gap between theory and practice, and students are assessed on how well they fare on this. I’m required to do about as much self-study as class time, and class time is divided into 50% teaching time and 50% practicals. The self-directed reading encourages investment in topics of interest, maturity, reflection, and creativity.

I don’t get the sense that I’m being isolated from what’s happening in the “real world”. Every Thursday evening, a member from the HCI or Ergonomics industry will spend an hour with us talking about their work and get the class involved with small industry-related activities, which help to give us a flavor of what it’s like.

2 weeks ago, Gigi Demming (ex-UCLIC) from Amberlight made us work out a usability consulting proposal based on a budget and some price indicators (how much it costs for a consultant, test users, etc.). I felt it was useful, even though I was dead tired by the end of the day.

The folks here

UCLIC is made up of strong academics and practitioners who teach. Some of the lecturers are quite established in their respective fields both academically and professionally, so it’s good to be able to draw from those experiences. The class is also made up of a very diverse crowd (gender, practice, background, nationality), and it makes things more well-rounded. It’s fun when we go out for a pint or two.

We get to do field trips like visits to the Serco usability centre and attend the Ergonomics Society Conference for Students. They made us volunteer for class representation, so some of us help plan social activities like visits to museums and so on. It feels like a good place to be.

ex-UCLIC

I must thank my friend, Alex Baxevanis, who helped answer a lot of the questions I had before coming here. UCLIC is quite well represented in the HCI industry here in the UK, and that gives me a bit of confidence that the program is quite well established. Even my ex-employer sung praises for it.

Quite a few UCLIC-ers set up blogs (e.g. http://www.usabilitytank.com) and are quite active on Facebook. It’s quite a community, really.