With this class, if you do the work you will get a good grade. It is writing heavy but the course itself is organized well and they give you all of the tools necessary to succeed. The grading in my opinion is very fair and the assignments tell you exactly what you need to do in order to get all of the points. Do not wait until the last minute to start the writing assignments (a majority of the course), if you start early they are super manageable and not difficult. If you wait until Sunday night, they will take a lot of time so plan accordingly. You can also get ahead in this course rather easily if you have the time. The TAs respond regularly on Ed lessons and I honestly enjoyed this course. A good class to take with a medium-level difficulty course. Although I found this course easy there are weekly assignments, lectures, and readings to keep up with. There are two exams both open book/note/lectures, ctrl+f was my friend. The one thing I fell behind on and pretty much did not do was the weekly readings and I still ended up with an 83% on the first exam and a 92% on the second. The lectures were extremely helpful and interesting, do not skip out on watching them. I ended up with a high A in this class simply by following instructions. Joyner is fantastic and I highly recommend taking at least one of his classes while in the program. He cares a lot about OMSCS student success.

For reviews Head over to omshub once it is up, else post on reddit r/omscs for questions in the interim. Fuck omscentral and meta

Very writing heavy class with mandatory discussions (which isn’t as bad as it could be, as OMS students tend to engage in the material). You get a lot of insight into how to effectively design systems for daily use. It’s kind of like a humanities/cognitive studies class about UX design.

What to expect:

Like most OMSCS classes, you’re graded more on what’s not there than what’s there (penalties, not subjectively graded), so using dictation tools like Microsoft and Dragon is a smart idea. Also working in jdf can be finnicky, so copy directly from the template and cite in APA (they haven’t deducted points from me yet for this) and don’t forget to save as a pdf.

Excellent first class for Interactive Intelligence focus people.

Cons

Do not take this course if you struggle with English.

I’ve heard from those that finished the degree that dropped this course because they could not fluently speak or write English. This course requires you to write 6 pages a week. If you struggle with English, you will struggle with this course a lot more than you struggle with English in general.

Pros

• Every assignment is available from the beginning of the course.
• Dr. Joyner uses Ed instead of the maligned Piazza and Udacity interfaces. The lectures are edited well and you can expect high quality content that is helpful for the course. Slack is not needed, this is another pro.
• Dr. Joyner responds to everything.
• Writing is very open to your experience with computer interfaces that you want to write about to demonstrate lecture topics.
• Peer reviews are fun.
• You get to rant about terrible interfaces that exist to make our lives harder, like Slack.
• You learn swanky vocabulary, like “affordance”
• Dr. Joyner provides a format template. It’s the same for all assignments, but not all of them require an abstract.

Opinions and Suggestions

• Easy course.
• Writing is very low stakes compared to having to have your programs function. Make sure to cover the lecture topics asked for in the assignment as your writing ideas flow onto paper.
• You learn interesting stuff.
• Watch the lectures, do all of the reviews until you max out your participation credit, and stay ahead as much as you can. If you do 3 peer reviews a week, fill out 25 surveys for each survey assignment, and do whatever else is expected, you will max out the participation before you start the final project for the last month of the course. This in turn disincentivizes peer reviews and surveys for the final project, so you can expect much less responses for peer reviews and surveys for the final project.
• Always start your surveys as soon as possible prior to starting your writing about the survey results.
• It took me like 2 to 6 hours to write the 6-8 pages for each week’s paper. 10 to 15 hours per week if you include watching lectures, making surveys, filling out surveys, and doing peer reviews.
• Make sure you interact with computer interfaces so you have interesting writing options to choose from. I was lucky to have picked up a number of video games just prior to taking the course that gave me ample things to write about.
• The final project is the easiest part of the course.
• Stroke your pride for getting the top submission in the class.

I have a software background and knew I preferred front-end & UI/UX over back-end development.

This was my first class in the program (I am now in my 5th) and made me realize just how passionate I am about interactive technology and designing with the user in mind. I found the course material super interesting and the lectures were the best you’ll see in the program. David Joyner cares more than any other professor because he truly believes in online education and wants to see it succeed. It sounds like I’m fanboying cause I honestly miss this class and wish I saw even half of the things that are done well in this class in my other classes. The assignments are all writing assignments besides the project ones where you get to make wireframes and get users to fill out surveys, etc. The final project is pretty cool cause you get to pick an application to redesign and actually create high fidelity prototypes (I highly recommend Adobe XD if you have access).

This was my first class in the OMSCS program. I have a BS in Computer Science and was fresh out of university when I applied and got into the OMSCS program. I have also been working for 7 months full time as a DevOps engineer after 2 years as an Associate Software Engineer.

Overall, this was a good first class. In my opinion, it was extremely easy and straightforward. There was no code written, simply written assignments, tests, and a final project. I found a lot of the assignments to be simply tedious and would often finish them in one sitting. Personally, I felt that the instructor practically tells you what to write, and if you follow the directions; 100% is easy to obtain on the assignments. The lectures were somewhat interesting, and some of the readings were interesting as well. Overall, this was a perfect first class to ease into the OMSCS program as it was straightforward, easy, and not too time consuming. I probably spent about an hour a day watching lectures or doing the readings and then spent perhaps 2-3 hours on each weekly assignment. If you follow the suggested schedule (of when to read, etc) you should have no issues keeping up. I will stay that the tests were extremely draining and tedious. It boiled down to a search game between lectures and the books (tests are open everything). I found myself using the entire time but also scoring high (high A on both tests) as I would look up each question in the lectures or the associated reading. In the end, I got a high A in the class.

I will say that Dr. Joyner seems really passionate which is great to see. The forum was usually pretty active which was also great to see. I enjoyed the class and learned a bit about UI/UX concepts. If you are looking for an easy class, I would consider this one. At no time did I really feel academically challenged, which did lead to a general drudgery going through the class, but I still learned a bit :).

WARNING: If you dislike reading or writing, avoid this. There is no coding.

With that being said, I HIGHLY recommend this course. This is my first course in OMSCS, but I went to undergrad at GT and this is the best lecture material I have ever encountered. Joyner puts things in layman’s terms and gives you examples so you can really apply these learnings and look at things in a new light. He really cares about the course, students, and information.

To do all readings, writings, peer reviews, lectures, and interaction, this will take you multiple hours a week, however, you can really parse it down if you cut out the readings. Here is my input on the different aspects of the course:

Assignments: Answer every single question and bolded word. Every. Single. One. Make it obvious to but breaking out stuff into subsections. It seems TAs only care if you answered something or not. They aren’t super focused on grammar and such. Thoughtfully check every box and you are good.

Lectures: Watch them. Take notes. You will learn a lot.

Readings: I did all reading first half then moved to only reading things 15 pages or less second half. Some of the readings are really interesting, but anything you don’t find interesting - skip it. You can do ok on the tests without it.

Tests: Really fair grading system. Based on how there are graded, they are basically 5 T/F statements within each question (30 Qs total - 20 on lectures and 10 on reading). If you watch the lectures and take notes, skim through them before the test, ctrl+F and you should be good. Open book, internet, everything on the tests. It’s more about understanding the lectures than memorizing anything.

Project: This is totally manageable. But actually do it. Don’t just make stuff up. I was shocked how much I learned from actually going through the evaluations and needfinding. I don’t think you will actually realize how much you aren’t your user until you do this. It takes extra effort, but it is well worth it.

Participation: Doing the peer reviews helped me see how much effort I should/shouldn’t be putting into assignments. It also helps you see different ideas and ways of approaching interface redesign, so it is worth it. Can’t say I got super insightful feedback from others, but I enjoyed reading (some) other’s papers. Don’t stress about the participation points. I was done about 3/4 into the semester by doing 4 peer reviews a week + 1-2 random interactions here or there answering others questions or participating in the lecture or reading discussions + a ton of surveys for people’s needfinding (this is the really easy place to get points).

Overall, I found this very interesting and super helpful, even for my current job for which I didn’t think it would actually apply at all (operational safety in the O&G industry).

The course webpage will tell you pretty much everything you need to know about the class, but, it was essentially this for Fall 2021 semester:

• An 8-page paper every week for 10 weeks
• Three peer reviews every week for 14 weeks (if you’re aiming for the easy participation points)
• Watching ~1 hour of lectures per week
• A final 20-page paper spaced out over 4 weeks
• Readings if you had time
• Two open-book, open-notes tests

I liked this class, but I hated all of the writing. I am someone who takes forever to write papers, so I easily spent at least 6 hours per week writing papers for this class (with many weeks going over that). I probably spent about 1.5 hours writing peer reviews, 1 hour watching lectures, and ~2 hours interacting with the discussion forums. I never had time to do the readings.

I loved Dr. Joyner as a professor, loved how pedagogically sound everything was, and thought it was a REALLY great course. As a personal preference, I wouldn’t take the class again, but I think everyone should take at least one Joyner class in their time with OMSCS because he really is a fantastic teacher.

Warning

This course has no programming, so if you’re looking to learn something that has to do with coding walk away.

I wouldn’t recommend this course unless you want a non-coding easy A and or you’re really interested in HCI. I’ll be honest I didn’t know much or anything about HCI before I signed up. You do learn a lot about it but I would rather code.

I got an A.

Pros

1. Easy A if you keep up with the papers you have to write
2. TA’s are helpful and Dr Joyner is a cool professor.
3. Lectures are high quality

Cons

1. No programming
2. Constant barrage of papers (1 due each week and they are not short!)

Okay, this is a class where you will learn a lot of things. But even more than that, you will learn HOW to think rather than what to think or just memorize definitions.

True, there are frameworks that you must learn, use the HCI vocabulary in your exams and assignments but the fruit of this course is teaching you how to think about the user and his or her interface experience.

If you excel at writing, this class should go by smoothly. If you struggle to write or would have difficulty writing about 6 pages per week for the entire semester, you may want to rethink about taking this class.

As long as you meet the criteria set out plainly for each weekly writing assignment, you will do fine in the assignment part.

If you contribute to the weekly peer reviews of your fellow classmates’ weekly assignment submissions, then you will earn required participation credits. But please don’t worry about these credits, as you will have more than enough time to earn participation credits by reviewing your classmate’s weekly assignments (i.e., homework) and also taking many brief student surveys.

The hardest part is perhaps are the two exams, especially if you have not read the many weekly readings. The readings are only required for you to know about 1/3 of the first exam and 2/3 of the second exam. I did not read most of them but still made it out alive. In fact, you are allowed to view the readings (and anything else) during the exam. (The only thing you can’t do during the exams is talk to a live human via chat, email, phone, etc.) I just used CLTR + F to find key words or phrases in the readings during the exam to answer the exam questions.

Lastly, I must say that the TA’s are super nice, helpful and the instructor Prof. David Joyner will actually answer questions for you without attitude (unlike some other classes). He really cares about his students and the quality class structure set up really shows this. (Do note that there are no office hours for this class, but a lively discussion forum, Ed Discussions, where you can post questions or even comments.)

And the professor was so nice and open to change and feedback that he suggested for us, at the end of the semester, to check out OMSCentral for future courses and write a review (whether bad or good) for this HCI course so others can know what to expect.

Other than that, I would highly recommend this course. Even if you are not the best at writing, I would still encourage you to enroll in this class. I don’t think you will regret it!

This course is excellent. I think it’s also an easy course if you plan your time well.

My advice is the following:

Don’t spend too much time on your assignments. Instead, plan out each section and write enough to meet the rubric requirements. Don’t impress the graders unless you want to shoot for exemplary. However, if you’re just interested in scoring a 20, you can easily do that just by ensuring you hit all the requirements.

Don’t read everything. Look for big ideas in papers and write them down. Skim the rest. Each reading took me no more than 20-30 minutes.

Write down notes of key concepts while watching lectures. Make flashcards in Anki or Remnote so you can review the course material throughout while you’re going about your day, which allows you never to have to sit down and study for the tests.

Use the shared notes and course transcript during the test to fill in anything you don’t remember.

I averaged 3-5 hours per week on this course. However, I know many of my classmates spent a lot more time. Though, I expect it’s because they read every word of the readings, which I’d encourage you not to do! It isn’t necessary for scoring well on the tests.

Really interesting content around UI/UX, which proved to be really useful and applicable! The hardest part of the course is keeping up with the assignments (i.e. you have to write 6-8 pages a week for assignments, followed by a 16-20 pages for individual project).

This can be difficult if you don’t like writing in general. However, will really recommend this class!

Review

This was my first OMSCS class and I was extremely nervous going into this class. The nerves quickly faded after the first couple of weeks as there were no surprises thrown at us and the class was extremely structured. I definitely got burnt out by the end of the semester with all of the writing, but the assignments really seemed to get easier as the semester progressed. Also, I attempted to stay caught up with the readings, but fell behind fast and never caught up. This didn’t really affect my grade in any way so… I guess it was okay? Overall, I enjoyed the course.

If you’ve taken HCI in undergrad, this won’t be too difficult or new to you. However, I think it’s a very worthwhile class regardless. The lectures and content for this course are S-tier and Joyner & his wonderful TAs are definitely passionate about the course subject.

There will be assignments nearly every week consisting of quite a lot of writing (5+ pages) with also weeks where you are collecting data from surveys, etc. This was honestly the biggest time sink as you will be doing copious amounts of writing, but it is all in an effort to really ingrain the teachings.

Quizzes and tests are not difficult/straightforward, just be wary of your time management in this class.

I worked as a web developer at a big company for three years and this was my first course of OMSCS. I was hoping for something more practical and tailored to web / mobile UIs based on the professional positioning of this program, but this course turned out to be much more on the academic side.

It takes a very broad view of HCI, and while the frameworks and flow you use make sense - I can’t imagine ever using something so thorough as a developer.. maybe if you’re an HCI PhD at a large company you’d write such a paper as you do in this course.

If the volume of academic readings were halved and the weekly peer reviews removed I may have engaged more with the actual material and assignments - but they became tiresome about halfway through.

Overall it’s a decent and easy course, but as others have said I’d only recommend it if you are truly into HCI.

You need to have a strong MBA gene to enjoy this course i.e. Hypothetical story telling, Enjoy writing long winded reports with little substance, Remembering useless acronyms, memorizing frameworks that could be written either way except an author decided to write them a certain way.

I took this course thinking its an easy filler with another difficult one, and boy did I pay a price. There are dense 8 pages to write every week and two long tests where you have to memorize (even though it’s open book) useless and dry framework ‘facts’. A little bit of me kept dying every time I wrote another bloated paper. It doesn’t matter how well the professor and TA’s try to mush it to make it easy to go down the gullet, the fact of the matter is: its a dry mud pie and hard to swallow unless you enjoy it.

Please don’t take this course unless you are really passionate about HCI. Read up a few papers on sigchi.org and decide if it’s a topic you won’t hate too much.

Harder than Intro to Health Informatics, easier than Machine Learning, better teacher than both (way better in the case of ML). I definitely learned a lot from this class- lots of information that will certainly come in handy in the future. Not a breeze, but an enriching journey.

It is like a social science class. Don’t waste your time on this course if you only want to practice your coding. However, it is a good choice if you just get a course that can get good grade easily.

Great course to take over the summer. Provides in-depth HCI theories covering principles, mythologies, implementations with A LOT OF extra readings. Learned a lot about HCI/UI/Research/Psychology. It is purely an English course, but it is very writing and reading heavy. One comprehensive writing assignment is due each week with two 150-True-False-question exams. The final project is a good summation and recap of all things learned during the semester.

Highly recommend to start early and do work throughout the week. I took the cramming approach leaving it to last two days before deadline each week. Exams were tricky with the wording, and I suggest to skim through the readings to have a basic understanding of the papers. Take notes and make study sheets for lecture notes are really helpful for the open-note exams. Overall, great non-coding class to take along with another coding class. Ended up with 93% with not too much efforts, and highly recommend!

I think the number of hours a week for this course could vary wildly based on who you are and what is your particular skill set. If you are a natural writer and demonstrate that you can understand concepts and write about them in context with real world applications then this class shouldn’t be too difficult. However, if English is not your first language this might be a little more difficult.

Most of the other reviews are very accurate in that this class is all writing based and there is a lot due each week(This though might have been because I was in the Summer session). I personally would watch the lectures and pause them repeatedly as I took my own notes. These helped me in both the test as well as referencing these terms in the subsequent papers I had to write. While watching the lectures this way took maybe twice as long as if I just watched them straight through, I then knew which lecture contained which piece of information which was helpful for the test.

My strategy for the test was to look over the notes from all the lectures, re-watch each lecture a couple days before the test on a fast forwarded setting and then skim some of the readings. Other reviewers are correct in that there is just way too much reading for one to do in a week if they are like me where they balance a job along with a family. A 40 page paper might have 1 single question on the test and that is something you can probably find or miss. I honestly barely read any of the papers from start to finish.

To get participation credit I strongly recommend doing peer reviews each week and then the last couple weeks of the semester taking as many surveys as possible. Surveys are usually pretty quick and are pretty good bang for your buck. I never posted on the forum and that form of participation felt forced(As do the peer reviews).

Overall the lectures are great and it is an interesting topic. Dr. Joyner also cares about this subject and it shows in his material which is nice to see. The class is also all laid out in advance so if you have a busy part of your semester coming up then you can get ahead of everything.

Wow ! Professor Joyner nailed it . Good Videos , good lecture . Real Online class which gives you option to cover up if something is missed . Easy to score A.

Human Computer Interaction was one of my favorite courses in OMSCS so far. The course is taught by Dr. David Joyner, who also happens to be the director of OMSCS. Despite his numerous responsibilities, he makes himself more available to students than I’ve seen professors do in other OMSCS courses. The lecture content for this course is by far the best of all the courses I’ve taken. It is structured in a way that helps you remember the material easily, and it’s just plain fun and interesting.

Although this course was fun, it was a LOT of work. There are 10 written assignments over the course of the semester, as well as 2 exams and one final written project. Each assignment is 6-8 pages of writing and touches upon “principles” or “methods” covered in the lectures. Some of the methods assignments require extra work of interviewing friends+family or sending out surveys to classmates. Be prepared to spend a lot of time on these assignments. In addition to submitting your own assignments, you also need to peer review 3 student’s assignments each week to gain class participation points. Overall I found that I had to do work for this class every single day of the week in order to keep up with the workload.

Luckily the exams are very fair and completely open book, so I didn’t find that I needed to study much for them. This course also has a lot of required readings, but I generally just skimmed them. The exams do ask about the readings, but you can usually search for the answers if needed. But just watch the clock so that you don’t spend too much time reading through the paper content and then run out of time on the rest of the exam.

Overall I really enjoyed this course. It is one of the most time-consuming courses I’ve taken, but also one of the most rewarding because you learn so much.

I picked this course when I previously evaluated between picking the Machine Learning or the Interactive Intelligence specialization. I was inclined to ML, but unfortunately the ML course is the only one mandatory choice in that specialization; I heard too many horror stories on that course hosted by Charles Isbell…. (Sorry Professor Isbell, you should be a great teacher, and I am sure all the previous students were misunderstanding or bad-mouthing you….) Therefore I picked the Interactive Intelligence route, which does not have much choices on the two elective courses, and finally I picked this HCI as one of the electives.

I under-estimated the difficulty of this HCI course, since it requires absolutely no software coding, no math, and no algorithm. But turns out this course is one of the most demanding courses I have ever seen, even more demanding than AI or Computer Vision. That is because HCI squeezes everything into a summer semester: It requires me to deliver 6 to 8 pages of assignment on every week. What’s more, these weekly assignments are intermixed with one CITI training (about research ethics), two exams, one project (which is 20 pages of writing), and endless peer feedback (a total of 50 to 60 short articles for a full participant credit). For me, I did 2 assignments per week, in order to save time to study the 2 exams, and to write that 20 pages of project paper. It is 2 months of endless writing. When compared to AI, I usually finished an assignment by the first week, and spent the week afterwards on watching video lectures or Netflix entertainments, which was much more relaxing.

The assignments and project are very hard to think and write, if you want to do them well. Strangely, my first assignment was given a low score by a TA, without a justified rubric, while all my other assignments were given a perfect score. I really doubt the marking schemes, and it may also mean that anyone can get a perfect score (or low score) no matter how bad (or how well) they write. Anyway, perfect scores are good.

The exams are much harder than you think, since the questions are usually non-obvious, which require you to search through research papers to verify the answers. I ended up using three or more minutes on each question, which are unprecedented in my life.

I personally dislike the peer feedback very much. My opinion is: Peer feedback is a good thing, but is not well implemented, since it does not affect the score of the reviewed assignment, and it does not affect the score the reviewers either. That being said, if these peer feedback ratings were really going to affect the scores of the reviewed assignments or the reviewing students, the feedback scheme has to be implemented very carefully with well configured algorithm, perhaps with Google Rank or Markov chain so that reviewers would not give arbitrary review scores and assignments would be reviewed fairly. Anyway, for now, the fact is, most peer feedback reviews that I received are pointless and just appraising my assignments (e.g. “great answer”, “well done”) without good reasons (and sometimes I think the reviewers did not really read my assignments), so for most of the time I just skip all the peer feedback reviews that were written to me.

Overall, I like this HCI course, since before it, I do not know HCI is so important, worth so much revenue, and can be so formally achieved. I used to think UI design is just by “feeling” and arbitrary. But after this HCI course, I know why Apple keeps changing its iOS interface in each iteration, and why iPhone iPad Mac can be sold at a premium than all other computer hardware. Despite all the marketing hypes, I think Apple really did a lot of hard works on HCI and understanding user’s needs. And the HCI course lets me know how many manufacturers out there are actually designing UI arbitrarily without good design principles. There are actually many UIs out there in the world that worth a serious re-design.

Finally, thank you Joyner for designing this HCI course!!

Very nice class, a must have for anyone working in software or manufacturing related fields. Learnt a lot of new useful concepts, though the course is mostly theoretical, the assignments took major amount of time with research, interviews, surveys etc for 5 assignments and 1 project. All the assignments given are really good and will increase our understanding of the concepts you learned in that week. Lecture videos are engaging and made using HCI principles, so will not get bored. Little time consuming than then 12hrs/week average written here. Tips :- 1. Be sure to do the assignments 1 week prior, project will take atleast 1 week - make sure to start it 1-2 weeks early. 2. Complete the required peer feedbacks before Thursday and gain more participation points via surveys, forum discussions - better utilization of time than the extra peer feedbacks. 3. Don’t waste time reading all the content in the papers in the required readings - only skim the introduction and conclusion. You will anyways have to Ctrl+F during the exam.

A softball course, but still useful

The content of this course is very easy to learn, mostly covering psychology and research concepts. The lectures are well done, the assignments are thoughtful, and the professor and TAs are very responsive. It can at times feel a bit dull (I like to code, so not getting to code is always a bit dull), but the topics feel useful to understand if you ever have to create front end interface. The project and assignments allow you to explore interfaces that are specifically interesting to you, which is a nice feature. At times I felt it was a little too easy to get an A in the course. As long as you hit all the points/answer all the questions in the assignment syllabus, you get full points, regardless of the quality of your designs. There is a peer feedback component, but I rarely got useful feedback.

My main complaints about the class are related to the readings and the exams. I counted it up–in the 10 week summer semester, we were assigned 876 pages of reading. Readings ranged from textbook chapters, to old but seminal papers, to more recent CHI papers. Like other Joyner classes, the exams were 150 True/False questions taken directly from lecture videos and these readings. Even if you read the readings in depth and take notes, you will still have to go back and look up the answers to the reading-related exam questions because they are (in my opinion) arbitrarily specific. In the first half I did all the readings and took notes on them as I did them. I am a slow reader, so this was tedious for me and would take 5-10 hours a week on it’s own. In the second half, I skipped all the readings and just skimmed over the headlines before the exam, which felt sufficient, because the process still worked exactly the same. Of course you gain more knowledge doing all the readings for the sake of, but it just exposes the arbitrary quality of the exams, which I dislike. In the first half of the semester, I spent about 15 hours per week on the course. I would say in the second half I spent 10 hours or less on the course per week–some of the principles assignments I could write in a matter of 2 hours.

I’m glad I took this as a summer course, particularly because I was very busy with work and other coding side projects and was overwhelmed in my time. The low effort of it made it possible to still do well and complete my other commitments.

Great instructor and lectures, but the readings are awful

The readings are dense, awful, ambiguous, and close to 100 pages a week. A lot of them are pure nonsense like “Do Artifacts have Politics”, which was written by a UC Berkley journalist locked-up alone with an unabridged Oxford Dictionary and a pile of cocaine in the late 1980s.

Otherwise, Joyner’s material is awesome, the assignments are OK (but they are papers), and you’ll probably walk away with a little better understanding of design.

I really enjoyed this class. I learned so much from it and the weekly writing assignments got me to look at interfaces in a new way. Even if I never become a designer or a UX researcher, I still think the principles of HCI are valuable enough to learn.

The one piece of advice I would give for preparing for exams is to not spend so much time on the weekly readings. The first time around, I read every reading carefully and took notes. It took A LOT of time and I ended up finding out that it was a complete waste of time because I ended up Control+F everything on the test. For the second exam, I read through each reading once fully and then skimmed them the second time to get a big picture of what the reading was about.

I also strongly depended on the written transcript of the lectures. I didn’t find myself using the notes that I took from the lectures. I found that rewatching the lectures a day or two before the exam really helped me to understand the concepts for the test.

I spent a total of around 12 hours for the class when taking into account time to watch lectures, take notes, complete the weekly writing assignment, and filling out peer reviews/surveys. I also think that Summer is a perfect semester to take this course as you have plenty of time to think about how to answer the writing topics and not have to worry about another class. It’s also totally doable if you want to pair this class with a tougher class.

I do think the project is a bit redundant with the M assignments but I get that they want us to try to apply the principles of HCI and research to a new interface design.

Overall, I really enjoyed this class and I highly recommend everyone to take it.

This is a great class that offers a really helpful perspective to have before doing any kind of engineering or data science work. It’s a lot of reading and writing compared to other courses, but I don’t think the overall investment is unreasonable. I comfortably got an A in ~9 hours a week.

The quality of the video lectures is outstanding, both the production value and the degree of attention to how they fit into the overall course. I’ve had classes (at OMSCS and elsewhere) where you feel like the lectures are only roughly related to the actual material the course is intended to cover – that’s not a problem at all here.

Exams are open notes. If you are struggling to keep up with the reading, first read the advice linked in the syllabus about how to read an academic paper, and if you’re still having trouble, realize that you don’t need to understand every detail to be ready for the exams. If you have a rough grasp of the main concepts in the paper, you’ll be fine.

The projects are quite flexible and give an opportunity to go as deep as you want. You can actually produce work that affects and interests other people! This is not true of many other courses.

Overall, I’m strongly in favor of this class unless you really feel uncomfortable with writing. There’s a lot of that, and while the quality of your writing doesn’t have to be amazing to get an A, it might be frustrating to have to do so much of it in one course.

HCI is an absolutely fantastic class for learning about some of the more qualitative pieces of computer science and dipping your toes into the design world. Although it’s not a UX/UI design class, it provides a new way to think and base your work in UX/UI design from a pricipled perspective. The final project itself is a walk through the design lifecycle and all that it entails, with a lot of great exercises to reinforce the information you learn in the class.

The course is very writing and reading intensive - as the course website outlines (check it out, just google the course number and David Joyner) you’ll be doing 30+ pages a week of reading, and 6-8 pages of writing a week, eventually culminating in the final project which is about 20 pages done over 3 weeks. The key to this class is starting early - especially if you are a slow writer like me, the earlier you start the better. However, despite the amount of writing, it’s graded rather easily - I think I missed a single point over the course on writing assignments. Pay close attention to the rubrics and make sure to address all of the required elements. Overall the workload as a whole is great for a relaxed, but still fulfilling, fall or spring semester, and would likely be a great option for summer.

HCI was my first course in Spring 2021. I enjoyed the course. But the time required to complete the assignments is tremendous. It is difficult to do last minute work and you need to read a lot for the exams. Though it is an open book exam, it is nearly impossible to search for answers during the exams. But the professor is generous and it is easy to score well on all the assignments and projects. And the course is definitely interesting. And no coding at all.

One tip that will help: All the questions will have 3 to 4 sub parts. So read all the parts very carefully and write answers to all these parts. If you can do that, it is easy to get full points on assignments. Don’t miss any single part of the question and try to score full points on all the assignments. That will help to get an A even if the exams go bad.

Also, get full points in class participation. That will help tremendously. I participated in surveys and that helped me get a major chunk of the 100 points. Don’t take participation credit lightly. It is pretty easy to score those points. Trust me when I say exams are tough. It is impossible to finish all the required readings and remember most of them. Hence try and score full points in assignments, project and participation.

The lecture videos are mostly easy to follow and are useful for answering the assignments. However, the assignments tend to be really long (8 pages in length) and take up quite some time if you intend to do it well.

The readings are elaborate and are almost always 80+ pages a week. This can be tiring. Not many people did this. But at the end of the day its really just about learning and how much effort you are willing to put in towards that goal.

The project is fairly straight forward once you complete the assignments. So that shouldn’t be a big task.

In terms of absolute learning, I would highly recommend this course as it teaches you to a way to look at products, a method that is usually uncommon among us engineers.

All in all, a good first semester course.

Excellent course, it is a lot of reading. The readings tie in really well with the modules, and it made the course for me. Especially near the end, the readings really help to put together a nice project.

The course is well organized and worth the time if you are willing to invest it. You come away thinking about interfaces and the products you use slightly differently; the thought process is already helping me at work. You will become a better evaluator and be much more useful for valuable feedback with products and interfaces.

If you are not into the design process and just want coding, this is not the course for you.

I took this course in my first semester. I am a full time student and paired it with another class. I have a background of CS and this class is very different from the classes I took in the past. I really enjoyed this class. The Professor and TAs are very helpful and fun to interactive with. The lectures are also made creatively for easy understanding.

This class has zero coding and very heavy on reading and writing. Before taking this class I was aware of it yet I was overwhelmed with the amount of reading/writing. The 10 assignments can be saturating but it helps with the project. I struggled for initial assignments but I was not alone. So don’t worry you’ll got used to it.

Overall, its a good class. I really learnt a lot of interesting concepts of HCI. Again heavy on reading/writing so try to frontload as much work as possible. Whenever in doubt post your queries on the forum and the TAs will help. With sufficient efforts you will be able to ace this class.

I really liked this class. I have been in IT for a long time, and I got a new perspective on developing. A lot of it is “common sense”, but it provided a good framework for me. It was very straightforward, I knew what I was supposed to do and there was strong linkage from Videos to readings to assignments to tests. It is a lot of writing, but generally if you answered each question in the prompt you were ok. I would recommend for anyone who develops software and does not have a well developed, user centered methodology.

This class is research driven and all about writing. It’s a lot of writing, but I found it enjoyable and pretty “easy”. The key is to stay on top of your assignments. Seems like lots of people procrastinate and then frenzy at the last to finish everything. Stay engaged and you’ll be fine.

The course is an overview of design principles and user-centered design. Each week requires a deliverable. “M” series assignments build upon the last to propagate you through the course’s main deliverable, the design lifecycle. Overall, the course is not complex, but it does require a lot of time investment. You will have to read a minimum of two papers a week, write ~5 pages (minimum), and provide feedback for 3-5 peers. The highlight of the course is the lectures produced by the professor and designing and executing on the design lifecycle (i.e., designing research). I highly recommend this course as an introduction to the program because the weekly deliverables will force you to get accustomed to school again. My full thoughts/impression is on my website

The course videos are very well produced and the course is well run. Each week has about 3-5 hours of videos which could take you more or less time depending on your watch and note taking styles. There are are fair number of additional readings that at first just seems to be there to enhance the content that is in the videos however I would suggest making the time to get through these reading as they are part of the mid-term and final. For the most part the assignments and the project are well explained and if you need help the course has an Ed Discussion forum to get help from students and faculty.

This was my first course in OMSCS. And I am glad to choose it. The entire course structure is available via this course’s website: https://omscs6750.gatech.edu/

1. Initial 3-4 weeks the workload remained around 21 hrs a week. Especially because you give your time in understanding the structure of the course and what all deliverables are and you also have to complete and submit a CITI training certificate which takes a significant amount of time.

2. Each week you have on due to that week’s assignment, lectures, readings, peer feedback, or tests, project check-ins, and project.

3. Content is easy to grasp and fun. The professor is AMAZING!!!!!! TAs are supportive too! Lecture videos are top of the class!

4. All the course content would be proactively given to you so you don’t have to search resources over the internet for learning concepts. It is complete in itself course.

5. Each week’s assignment is around 6-8 pages long so be prepared for that.

6. 2 Tests are good enough. Each test is of 150 marks out of which, 100 marks from lectures, and 50 from readings.

7. I didn’t complete all readings, just skimmed through them, and still could get more than 125 in both the tests. Because the tests are “Open Everything” so you can use “CTRL + F” and find answers through the readings. Making handwritten notes through the lecture videos helped a lot for me.

8. In the case of “Summer” this course would have been a lot of work to do. The course content isn’t difficult to understand but you need TO WORK A LOT. I mean, you’d have to give a significant amount of Thought and Hard work to go through the course deliverables. (But that hard work is not difficult to do but it does just takes significant time)

9. The more you do, the more you get out of this course. I would recommend this course to a newcomer to get started in OMSCS or have an interest in the field of HCI.

10. That’s it. It was an introductory HCI course. I liked it! This was easily doable as I took only one course and it wasn’t a summer term either. So even though it needs more effort, but you should be able to deliver it! Go ahead.

I came in with little knowledge of the subject hoping to develop some interest, but it never really grabbed me. Could be a great course if you’re really excited about interface design and have a some good ideas for interfaces you’d like to work on. More than half of the work in this class focuses on walking through the process of redesigning a couple of interfaces of your choice.

If you have trouble coming up with engaging interface ideas, this class can be a slog; that’s how it was for me. From what I could see in peer reviewing assignments, it seemed like some other people had fun with it though.

And it’s not terribly difficult in any case so long as you address everything in the assignment rubrics.

Only other complaint is that the material can get jargony, with researchers constantly inventing terms and frameworks, and the assignment grading rubrics seem to expect a pretty rigid application of these ideas, fuzzy and subjective though they may be. You’ll be introduced to a lot of these frameworks, but some do a better job explaining and justifying their existence than others.

Very informative course, requires a lot of writing, assignments due every week (8 pages max), final project again writing about a different interface than what was explored in the assignments, 2 tests which are open book (30 questions each, 2 hours), required readings every week.

Full disclosure, I took this course in Spring ‘21. Doubt it changed but while it’s fresh in my head I’m going to type something up.

I’m not a technical person but do love psychology so I was passionate about this course. You really can’t go wrong with Dr. Joyner, either. He’s definitely a modern teacher who knows how to properly teach material that is interesting and reflects what you’ll be assigned on your projects. You know those professors who lecture then have you write a paper or do a project on something they never even touched on? Or how about those professors whose tests are simply memorization-of-facts and not concepts? Yea…Dr. Joyner is NOT that guy.

Definitely recommend it. Don’t be intimidated by the workload…I tend to do more than I need to and most can probably get away with 10hrs/wk and do just fine. I just liked the material alot so I soaked it all in.

It’s a good starter class. It’s definitely a lot of writing but it’s graded fairly easy. The instructors will work with you too which I appreciated a lot. There are weekly peer reviews and some students will purposely give poor peer reviews to try to screw others over, but the graders grade on their own. I had an assignment where someone trashed me and gave me a failing grade on the peer review for no reason and the grader still gave me a 100 on the assignment because it was properly done. For the participation, I did a bunch of surveys but overall it’s a pretty straightforward class and I am happy that I took it.

This was my first course in OMSCS and the only course I took this semester. Thoroughly enjoyed the topic and Dr. Joyner and the TA’s participation. I struggled with marking this course easy or medium. Don’t think because the course is marked easy that it doesn’t require work. Lots of writing, reading, and peer reviews involved. The two tests are 30 questions each and are open notes, book, web, etc. You have 2 hours to take the tests and you WILL use every minute of that time. That should tell you how challenging some of the questions can be. Overall a very well-run course and gets you thinking about the vast world of HCI.

Summary - great course, worth taking. It is more time consuming than “difficult” - if enough time is invested, it is definitely achievable to score a good A. The instructor (professor Joyner) is great as well, keeps the ship very organized.

Workload - workload for me was quite high. Every week there is a 8 pages essay to submit and the academic requirements are high - Abstract, References, Appendices, etc are all expected. At the end there is a 20 page project. Two tests in between. Overall, I would say that every week I put 3 hours into the lectures, 2 hours into class participation (also graded - peer reviews, forum participation, etc), 3 hours into the required readings and probably about 12 hours into the assignment/project work - for an alltogether workload of 20 hours per week.

That being said, I was a bit of an over achiever for some of these - got recognized for exemplary assignment submissions for example. This is not strictly necessary, as apart of the recognition you receive, doesn’t give a grade boost. I would think that you can probably get an A assignment submission in 5-6 hours per week and could probably get away without doing the required readings. Which esentially halves the weekly workload to about 10-11 hours.

Difficulty - the course is strcutured in such a way that it is not difficult to follow. All concepts are explained very well and expectations for all course work quite clear. It is by far the best course in terms of structure that I have seen in this degree so far, so would encourage people to go for it, even if it is off-topic for them :)

Great content, covering topics I will remember for a long time and which will be directly applicable to my work.

Lectures are well organized, and easy to follow, and readings tie in pretty straightforwardly.

There is a lot of homework and it’s frontloaded. 2k word written assignments due most weeks, covering principles and methods. Then a 8k project that covers a lot of the same ground. Two multiple choice tests part way through.

I enjoyed it overall, though I won’t miss churning out essays.

This is an easy class if you like writing. It’s a Joyner class so the content is good (if a bit…over-presented) and he’s hands-on in the forums.

The bulk of this class comes from 10 written assignment. Half of them are simple writing prompts with four questions per assignment. This is a similar format to KBAI in the question prompts and what’s expected. The other half are a semester-long design project/

I finished about 6 of these assignments over winter break, and I wasn’t trying to be some huge over-achiever. The questions are pretty easy, if you can knock out essays, this class is an easy A. I found the grading to be really generous. The prompts lay out exactly what the TAs expect from your answer. If you literally copy the lines from the prompt and answer it below, you’ll get near-perfects on the essays.

There’s no coding, absolutely zero. The tests are easy and open book/open note. The content is interesting and lectures are fun but it moves really slowly. I think I would have had more fun taking this in the summer for that reason.

Overall - really light course-load and every assignment is available upfront - including tests - so you can frontload the heck out of this thing.

Makes a good pairing with a harder course.

This course is really well structured and very well run. TAs will usually respond to questions within a few hours. All in all it’s one of the best organized courses in the OMSCS

None of the work in this course is difficult, but it is rather time consuming. There is no coding in this course (though there is a bit of wireframing), but you’ll be writing a 6-8 page paper every week of the entire semester. There are no off weeks.

Course felt a little front-loaded to me but I think that was more a result of me going overboard at the start to ensure good grades

The course is well organized and has solid lectures. The material is useful and the professor is passionate about it. It’s the gold standard for courses in my opinion

The downsides were there were a ton of readings that weren’t really used except when it came to exams. I’d much rather there be a smaller amount of high-value readings instead of the overwhelming amount of low-value readings there currently is. Additionally, TA grades can feel subjective and the re-grade process is pretty bad and the exam had some questions on it that were confusingly worded or more open-ended then the true/false format allows.

This was my first course of the program and I did not pair it with another course. There is a lot of writing as everyone else has mentioned. The TAs are very helpful and grading seems lenient. I would put in around 25 hours a week to do the coursework. When the project prototype or tests came around, I probably put in 40 hours a week. I honestly still could have gotten an A by putting in less work, but my anxiety always nags at me with “did I do enough?”, if I don’t give the coursework my 100%.

HCI was awesome and I got an A. Professor Joyner does an incredible job structuring the course and the lectures are top notch (much more engaging than my college in-person classes). There is a lot of reading, but honestly you can get away with doing maybe 50% of it (and mostly stuff from the first half of the course, the second half mostly builds on the first half). I found the writing assignments to be the most time intensive part (there’s a paper due every week). You do two projects in the class (one of which is built overtime with the weekly writing assignments), and they’re both pretty low-key and fun in my opinion. The tests were fair, and the open-book aspect helps a lot. I recommend getting a good PDF reader application and using that for annotations and keyword searches. The TAs were pretty helpful and I felt my assignments were fairly graded. Overall, a great first course for me.

This course was enjoyable though if you don’t like writing, you might not like it as there is a lot. There are a ton of papers to read, too, but there is good advice at the beginning of the semester about managing that. I really enjoyed the change in perspective on designing interfaces that this course brought to my awareness and I hope that I’ll remember a lot of what I learned to put it to use in future work. Design is much more interested than I’d realized and that’s one of the strong points of this course – it makes the subject interesting and presents it concisely and makes learning it easier. I strongly recommend it especially since there is a need for better design in our everyday world.

I took this class as it had gotten fairly good reviews and I have to say I was disappointed although not by the instructor. I found the material extremely dry and really repetitive.

There is zero coding in the class and lots of readings and lectures and opining about said readings and lectures in the form of weekly 8 page papers.

The assignments are a series of papers, some classified as M and some as P. The M assignments covered “Methods” and P assignments covered “Principles”. Then there was an individual final project that spanned 4 weeks total which was a combination of P and M information.

The Piazza forum is fairly active for this class with lots of posts to follow and read. You also need to earn participation points by posting to Piazza and/or completing peer reviews and surveys for other classmates.

There are 2 exams - one midterm and one final. Both are open everything and are fairly straightforward from the lectures and readings. You do have to have at least some familiarity with the readings in order to do well on the exams. I did not read every reading, just skimmed and highlighted enough to make sure I could find information during the exam.

Overall I found the course tedious. However, I will say it has given me some insights into why product management in some companies is doomed for failure when they don’t accurately measure what the customer needs vs what they say they want. So I guess I did learn something.

• Prerequisites
  • None!
• Lectures
  • Fantastic lectures! Absolutely great job on Joyner’s part
• Projects
  • 8-page paper due EACH week
  • Alternate each week between theory and a research project
  • Final paper is 20 pages and a full HCI research study
• Exams
  • 2 tests – midterm and final
  • Basically a 150-question multiple choice test
  • With 50 questions about reading
• Time Spent / week
  • Average 7 hours / week
• Recommendation
  • Don’t take this with another writing heavy course (e.g. KBAI)
  • Do take this if you care about the end user (developing products, updating existing systems, any security work, etc)
  • You will think differently after this class and it will benefit you in the long run!

Although the class was very easy, you learn a lot of practical skills including needfinding, basic statistical analysis, and how to articulate precisely what makes an interface good or not.

This course emphasizes the soft skills more than coding, so if you are a fast reader/writer, it will be easy. Professor Joyner is an excellent instructor, and was very thoughtful to remove the group project when COVID-19 emerged in the USA in March. I believe this class is helpful for any developer, PM, data scientist, etc as it gives you the skillset to discuss interfaces intelligently.

This class overall has both pros and cons, it ultimately depends on what you intend to get out of it.

I recommend taking this class if you want an easy class to either pair with another course or simply for a GPA booster. I DO NOT recommend taking this class for the actual course content. There is no coding in this class and it might as well be considered an English comp course considering every single assignment is a written paper.

Instead of breaking down every single part of this course I’m going to just list the tips I have if you do decide to take HCI:

1. Be prepared to write a 6-8 page paper every single week. The “project” at the end of the course is a 16-20 page paper but you have plenty of time to do it.
2. The grading is pretty lax in this course, just put in a little effort on each assignment and you’ll be alright.
3. DO NOT do the weekly readings they are pointless. There are questions on each exam (2 exams total) over the readings. Reading them beforehand is impossible but the exam is open note so you can CTRL+F to find the answers you need in the readings during the exams. You will not be able to find every single answer and Dr. Joyner for whatever reason intentionally puts tricky questions out there. Just get the points where you can.
4. Here’s how I studied for each exam and my results: Exam 1: 116/150 I did not do the readings. I watched most of the lecture videos but not all. I did not review any material right before the exam. I answered what I could during the exam and spent a ton of time trying to search for answers in the readings/lectures transcripts during the exam. Exam 2: 138/150 I still DID NOT spend a minute on the readings prior to the exam. Comical isn’t it? What I did differently this time was I spent about 5 hours before the exam rewatching every lecture video that was to be covered in this exam. And that was it. Didn’t write down any notes, just watched the lecture videos. Best way to prepare.
5. I made a 100% on the final project. Spent about 12 hours on it all in all.
6. To get my class participation points I took 170 surveys (took me a couple hours to get through them), made a few piazza posts, and did a few peer reviews. It’s all annoying but doing the surveys is less annoying as they are super quick.

This class is not hard. If somebody tells you this class is hard they don’t belong in this program. I’m lazy and I procrastinate on everything and I got a comfortable A.

This is my first OMSCS course and I’m glad I survived! The lecture is very well designed and helpful. I work on product development projects and many concepts and methods from the lecture are what we are using every day. It can really help you get a better understanding of the product development life cycle. As a non-native English speaker, it’s a bit challenging as there is a ton of reading and writing. I spent most of my Saturdays on assignments. You need to recruit participants for some of the assignments. Tests are open-book, open-notes and it is okay as long as you make good notes and do the reading “strategically”.

This is more like an English class, with tons of readings and writings. No kidding.

The lectures are very well designed and the instructor is fantastic.

The project and homework are extremely time consuming. You will certainly get bored and exhausted with those writings and readings, unless you’re genuinely interested in the class materials. (I don’t enjoy it, TBH.)

The course difficulty is medium, because it’s an easy B but require a lot of time efforts to get an A.

This was my first course in the OMSCS program, and I really enjoyed it!

While this course did not involve any programming work, it did involve a ton of reading, writing, and research. Every week, there was: assigned reading (usually 50-120 pages), an 8 page paper, class participation (there was a different assigned discussion topic every day, Monday through Friday), 3 peer reviews to complete (i.e. of other people’s paper submissions), and a series of short yet condensed lectures. There were a large selection of optional papers (really interesting papers), two exams, and two full design projects.

The papers included classics in technology innovation (e.g. on the development of the Apple Mouse, the light pen, the Xerox Star, etc.) and in HCI research (e.g. papers by Don Norman, Ed Hutchins, etc.). There were lots of papers on the current state-of-the-art in HCI (i.e. recent papers, this is an actively curated and updated course).

We discussed some really interesting technology topics such as ubicomp, VR/AR, IoT, CSCW, etc. Some of the HCI topics changed the way I think about technology and computing, including: distributed cognition, cognitive load, gulfs of execution and evaluation, activity theory, artifacts as politics, and many others. Some of the papers offered insight into the current technology challenges in worlds that I knew little or nothing about, such as the data management and communication challenges that police forces face when investigating interstate and intertown human trafficking cases or the use of technology to address food disparities in regions in America known as “food deserts.”

The overall focus of this course was on designing high-quality interfaces and interactions (or, more specifically, designing user tasks through these interfaces). Quality was evaluated based a large assortment of design principles and on user research. Each design project involved a full iteration of the design life cycle from: needfinding -> design alternatives -> prototyping -> evaluation. During each iteration we would conduct research, model user behaviour, and design an interface. We would also design, administer, and analyse surveys, interviews, and other research methods selected from a large pool of research protocols. To build the prototypes, We were given free access to some professional design software products. One of the required prototypes was low fidelity and the other was medium-to-high fidelity. We also had to fill out a lot of surveys and evaluations for classmates.

Overall, the course is very well designed and I highly recommend it for anyone that is interested in interface design or HCI research. My background made me uniquely prepared for this course, and I still learned a lot. This course will expand your perspective on HCI (it’s an absolutely huge field), will change the way you think (about designing interfaces, human behaviour, tasks, etc.), and will equip you with the tools to become a better designer (and, I would argue, a better software engineer). In many ways this course felt like the stereotypical graduate course where you expand your way of thinking, learn about the state of the art, build research skills, discuss topics, conduct peer reviews, and read a curated collection of content that was prepared by an expert in the field. It’s a fascinating subject that many engineers overlook, and I was not originally intending to take this course. But, I’m glad that I did, and now believe that this should be a requirement for graduate level computer science programs.

This is a well put together course with very enjoyable lectures. The course assignments are split across weekly assignments, two tests, participation points and a final project. If you are good at writing and pay close attention to the bolded assignment requirements you should do well as they don’t belittle you from a grading perspective.

Overall if you are looking for a course that focuses on the physicological principles of creating interfaces this is a fantastic course. If you are simply enrolled to improve your coding, then this is not the course for that as there is no coding.

I think I echo many sentiments here when I say that Dr. Joyner is a fantastic professor, and you can tell how passionate he is about making online education accessible and digestible. This was my first OMSCS class and lowkey dreading some of the other classes because I’ll just be comparing the lecture quality to these, and be disappointed.

The pros:

• Great coordination and communication on Piazza about all aspects of the class, from weekly assignments, overviews of tests, and participation.
• TAs and Prof were all very responsive on Piazza.
• Insightful material and homework, very much tangible to real-world applications
• Workload felt fair and manageable.

The cons:

• A crap ton of writing. 6-8 pages a week, with a 20-page final project essay. It’s definitely not difficult writing, like a literary analysis or anything, but it takes some getting used to after working as a software engineer where most of what you type is code.

This is an example class for all other classes at Georgia Tech. David Joyner’s passion for improvements in the education technology is clearly visible in how involved he is in the video lectures. Absolutely loved it.

The class doesn’t involve any programming but involves papers to be written every week. There a fare amount of reading involved so be prepared for that.

Overall a great class that provides you to think differently on how you approach human computer interaction. In fact once you take this class you’ll probably view everything differently.

A very useful course on design thinking, which is gives me a different perspective on things. The course content is very well structured and easy to understand. The homework assignments are very time-consuming, but really helpful in helping me to understand the concepts from the lectures. The only cons from this course is the heavy reading required, and some of the materials are not super useful. I skipped most of the reading material and just control f during the exams as it’s not worth investing the amount of effort reading it. The assignments, projects and class participation will pull up your grade, thus it should be an easy A if you put in the effort for those, and score just above 80 for the tests.

Note the anomaly? It is easy to understand, the projects are relatively easy to score, the tests are open book, but man its a lot of work. The SUmmer term is even more packed, with exams and assignments/projects dues the same week. The lecture videos are till now the best I have seen so far - highly engauging and informative.

Check out further details about it on my page OMSCS Journey: HCI

Nice easy summer class especially if you want to take a break from coding. I’m from a non-English speaking background and I find it a good way practicing English writing skills. Concepts are easy to understand. As long as you follow all the instructions and answer all the questions, it’s easy to get an A.

btw, reading papers several days before the exams is necessary (I didn’t read any for midterm and it’s a huge mistake).

This is a very well organized class. Even though there are no coding assignments, every assignment forces students to think and use the concepts covered in the class to apply to different user interfaces. The TAs and the professor are very helpful. Only drawback I found that the need to do peer reviews which is not helpful in understanding the subject. Overall I loved the class.

Excellent course. Not particularly difficult, but a lot of work nonetheless.

Pros:

1. course material is interesting
2. lectures are fun and to the point
3. allows us to explore a “different world” other than writing code

Cons:

1. too much reading. A significant amount of exam is focused on readings. ctrl + F would not always find what you want.

I like this course overall. TA’s are helpful. I have never written so many essays before, and English is not my first language. But yet I am still be able to get an A.

I wouldn’t say this course is very easy given the amount of workload, but at least it gives reward for the effort that you put in.

As my 10th and final OMSCS course, this class offered an interesting change of pace from the typical focus on coding and algorithms: all the assignments and the final project are reports, so be prepared to write (and peer review others’ writing). Besides the weekly 6-8 page papers and ~16 page individual project, the summer semester includes two open book multiple choice tests and participation points. Dr. Joyner has created the most passionate and engaging lectures of any course in the program to teach the basics of design principles and design methods that you can use to create compelling interfaces. Unfortunately the readings can be hit or miss, ranging from really interesting to downright dry, but you can absolutely skim them (abstract, intro, conclusion) to get the main idea and then search them during exams.

This course is very well organized and you can work at your own pace, given that all assignment directions and even the exams are available from week 1. The assignment reports can be deceptively difficult and a major time suck if you are aiming to write high quality papers, so I recommend completing an outline throughout the week as you consume relevant learning materials. Likewise, you may want to complete sections of the project (which focuses on a DISTINCT task from the assignments) at the same time that you’re working on applicable assignments, rather than waiting until the final week to do it all like I did. The final suggestions I’ll make is the same I’d say for any class - keep a checklist of everything that’s due, and create some flashcards (preferably digital, like Anki SRS) to help you remember the material.

Another of Dr. Joyner’s classes, so it should feel very familiar if you’ve taken others. The class definitely changed the way that I think about interfaces (both as a user and a designer). A great example of a course where you get out what you put in. Lectures are high quality and digestible - watching them with pauses for notetaking never took me more than ~3 hours per week.

Weekly written assignments are what eats up the most time. Some prompts are thought-provoking and feel worthwhile, others are busywork, but either way you’ll be writing 6-8 pages a week. Some of the other reviews complain about the volume of required readings as well. Dr. Joyner said himself that these aren’t intended to be read word for word, but more skimmed. Honestly, you could open them for the first time during the tests and ctrl+F your way to a decent grade. There’s a CITI training you’ll have to do, don’t underestimate that, it takes longer than you think so get it done early.

Overall a great summer class - there’s no group project in the summer, and the class is more work than I’d want to pair with a difficult class in Fall/Spring. Would take again.

I have a full time busy job and a software background. I really like this course as it introduces a brand new field to me, something I have never thought about as a software engineer. I did not spend too much time on the course and still managed to get a grade >= B so I’d say it’s an easy class.

Pros:

• The video lectures of this course are the best of the OMSCS classes I have taken so far (I have taken 5 classes now). They are very well organized and presented (yes we are in an HCI class so you’d expect it to have good designs :)
• The TAs are very responsive. They respond quickly in Piazza.
• Although there are quite a lot of reading and writing in assignments and project, the grading are pretty generous. I usually think about the outlines during my work commute, and the writing part only takes a couple of hours per week.
• I think the tests did a good job covering all the materials from the lectures and readings. I like the multiple choices questions format.

Cons:

• There are a lot of writing in this class. A 6-8 pages paper every week. A 12-16 pages paper at the end of the semester. And lots of readings as well, usually ~100 pages per week. I did not finish all the readings though. I only read about 1 paper per week, which ends up fine for me.
• On the week of test it is pretty heavy loaded. On that week you need to do an assignment, do all the readings, and do the test. There are two tests so two weeks of heavy load. Other weeks are much better.

I think this is a worthwhile class for anyone who hasn’t taken UX/UI/HCI coursework before. In addition to working through a lot of the core HCI topics, you’ll get a lot of computing history, and some coverage of software engineering practices, which could be particularly beneficial to career-switchers. The material isn’t challenging, but if you’re trying to get an A, it could take a good (albeit fairly consistent) amount of your time every week – there’s lots of reading, and a fair amount of writing to be done on a regular basis. However, it is one of the best-organized online courses that I’ve ever seen.

I’ve seen some other reviews express frustration at transparency/consistency of grading, which surprised me. I found grading extremely predictable - the weekly assignment specs tell you exactly what information is needed, and you’re graded solely on whether you cover every component of each question in semi-coherent language. The quality of your argument or description just needs to meet a very low bar and you’ll receive credit. I stretched some of the prompts pretty significantly (my course-wide P assignments were written on a topic that wasn’t really visual or tangible), and I got full credit every time. If you carefully read the assignment prompts, you will too.

This course’s exam policy is by far the most reasonable that I’ve seen in the program: everything is fair game except for communication with other people, meaning you don’t have to stress about making sure you have a mirror behind you or showing your notes to the camera or whatever. As others have said, I think you probably should read everything once, at least to a depth where you can remember where to find something later, but a lot of the questions were answerable just by a Google search or by ctrl+f’ing through the readings.

I didn’t hate the participation points. Normally, I would, but it’s not so bad in this class. Lots of Piazza posts are low-effort, but many people write genuinely interesting things or well thought out responses to questions. I probably got 2/3 of the necessary participation points by filling out surveys while hanging out on a Saturday, so it’s not like it’ll take over your life.

If you were well-organized and an average reader/writer, you could probably do ~5 hours a week and get a B. I am not well-organized, so it took me 15 or so hours (in the summer) to get into A territory.

This class had more reading and writing than I have ever experienced before. It seems comparable to what a law student might expect. However, the course is well run and can be very interesting at times. Tests are hard, but they are open book/notes, so if you can Ctrl+F fast enough you’ll be alright.

Not suitable for those with busy day jobs and this should be the only course you take, if you do take it. The course could even bring health complications when coupled with a busy day job (no kidding).

Assignments are 8 pages long Week-over-Week and requires deep thinking, getting surveys, doing interviews etc

You have peer reviews to do each week - these require patience to read the work of others and give good reviews else you will lose points. The class has participation points so you have to do this along-with participating in piazza and doing other stuff Week-over-Week

You have 2 exams for which you have to read material that is basically the equivalent of content in a library.The reading is about 150 pages week-over-week and you will be tested on this. You also will be tested on the lecture videos Week-over-Week

Finally you have a project that you have to do alone and the topic should not be an extension of your homework.

Your health will be affected if you have a full-time job that is demanding

Course material is good and useful if you design products and interfaces. However, there is way too much writing and the material seems redundant, especially with doing the projects. Also tons of reading as well, this courses seems on par with the real heavyweights, like CV and ML. Just takes too much time in my opinion, and the assignment requirements are not clear…

Material itself is not too bad. lot of writing, and the worst part is TA just take out points easily with no clear reason where and why. There’s no rubic available and TA will not care to explain. 150 pages per week reading is a bit too much … and it’s going to be tested. It was scheduled as 1 hr reading per week. If that’s the case, I suggested that prof should teach us how to skim 150 pages in 1 hr, and yet able to answer those test questions. Afterall, lectures will seldom mention those papers. Personally, it’s more research like reading so I suggested to take it out especially for short summer course. Participation is the worst. Peer review don’t learn much and Piazza participation is waste of time.

This class is all about best design and design practices for the creation of interfaces. Really heavy on the writing, and there is no coding aspect to it. Very interesting material and good lecture materials, but there are honestly a lot of reading and writing in this course that can make it feel a bit dry. Tests were open book, open note, but were still a challenge. Overall solid course, but not for everyone if you really are looking to code.

The Joyner classes are so well organized and planned, it’s hard not to like this one. Although there was no coding, it was fun and gave me a better of understanding of design. The assignments are very regular, and come in the form of written essays so prepare to be creative! I’m not the biggest fan of group assignments, but be sure to pick good teammates early on so your grade doesn’t get dragged down on the group assignments.

I have mixed feelings about this course. First of all, I would like to commend the instructor and TAs because they do an outstanding job. The course itself is very interesting, especially since i have never taken a true design course before and because I am personally interested in a lot of the psychology of design. However, the amount that I learned and enjoyed this course is far out of proportion to the amount of work.

If you actually do the course right (read all of the papers, watch all of the lectures, do all of the participation components) this class could easily take up 20+ hours in a week. The frustrating thing about it is that most of that work is not productive. I really only found value in the lectures and papers.

The workload:

• 2-3 one-hour lectures a week
• Avg of 80 pages of reading a week
• 8-page written paper a week
• 3 peer reviews of last week’s 8 page paper (took me ~30 minutes each)
• One individual project (12 page written assignment)
• One group project (this was canceled my term due to COVID-19)
• 2 open ‘everything’ tests

In summary, it’s an interesting course that asks way too much in terms of workload for the material being learned.

I liked the material covered and the quality of the lectures, but that’s about it. I honestly don’t see much point in forcing people to “participate” with peer reviews and stuff, because most of the reviews that I see are few sentences long “Great job!” comments since people understandably don’t want to spend much time reading your paper and thoroughly review it. Now, I guess you can still get a full participation credit without having to do the peer review, but be prepared to answer a lot of surveys and participate in Piazza.

The amount of nitpicking with grading is pretty incredible, and they don’t really provide a solid rubric for each paper. They could arbitrarily say “Your paper didn’t explain this enough” and knock off points and there’s nothing you can do about it. Bringing this matter to TA didn’t work either as the head TA has a pretty dismissive tone towards the people who are asking for a regrade. I just stopped asking since I know all I’m going to get is “Your grade is final and feel free to reach out again if you want more explanation” BS. I just can’t wait for this semester to be over with so I can get out of this course.

I have no complaints about Prof. Joyner as he’s a great instructor, but I can’t say I like this course due to the other stuff that’s happening in the class. Overall, great material, poor execution.

As someone who studied humanities during undergrad, I had no problem with writing in this course. I wanted to learn more about UI and UX design and research, but at the end I felt like I didn’t learn too much about the topics.

It just felt like another “people and computer” course where you just read some article and write whatever you want.

Background: Non-CS background, non English native speaker Pros: 1. very structured course, easy to navigate. This is the first course I took in the program. This well-structured course help me get familiar with everything.

1. Professor and TAs are active in Piazza. The responses are very quick and helpful.
2. No coding. I’m not sure if I want to include this in PROS but it is not a traditional CS course. It’s more like a UI design course. Cons: 1. TOO many assignments and each assignment requires at least of 6 pages writing every week. It is painful for a non-native speaker to write so many words.
3. Exams are not easy. There are too many readings each week and those reading materials are actually be tested in exams. Even if it is open everything exam, it still takes a lot of time to navigate between readings. If you want to get an A, you should at least skim all readings before exam.
4. I like the individual projects but not the group project. Luckily I had a great group but it still wastes time when trying to fit everyone’s schedule. Make sure you have group members in the same time zone.
5. Write Peer feedback to earn participant grades every week.

At first I didn’t like this course because the excessive homework and readings. The first half of semester is very painful for me because I’m not that familiar in writing in English. But things get better through out the semester. In the end I got an A. Tips: 1. Write peer feedback every week as assigned and require extra one if you don’t want to post on Piazza to earn participant scores. You don’t want to write tens of feedbacks in the final week. And make sure you get full credit in participant to ensure an A.

1. Skim all readings before exam. At least to know where to find certain topics.
2. Put effort in individual project. It worth a lot.

There is a lot of “required reading” that could be skimmed. Videos are great. There is a ton of writing. About an 8 page paper a week. Then reading 3 other 8 page papers a week and reviewing them. This is on top of the 150 pages a week of required reading.

Very structured class. Not a coding class. Overall, not bad. Shines light into a place i think is often overlooked.

This course is mostly theoretical and requires lot of reading and writing assignment. There is weekly writing assignments followed by 2 projects and 2 tests. Assignments are easy mostly based on the lecture videos of the week and needs 8 page submission. If all assignments are submitted in time it is easy to score a A. Exams requires reading of documents and research papers provided but the good side is it’s open book .So one can search the answers to the questions.

Professor Joyer and TAs and very responsive and grades assignments every week.

The course focuses on designing principle of systems that interacts with human.As I told earlier it is fully theoretical and has no coding involved.

Best class I’ve ever taken. Perfect balance of fun, new skills, applicability to real world and unlikely to have seen material before.

Assignments are very manageable. There is always a week to do them and most take 2 hours at the most. It’s pretty easy to work ahead and build up some buffer. Exams are very representative of the material and, if you watch all the lectures and take good notes, you’ll likely get an A.

There is a group assignment but it’s way better than in most classes. It’s easy enough that, even if your team isn’t helping, you could do it by yourself and still ace it.

Lectures are perfect and the materials is something you can use for the rest of your life.

Everything was just right. Drawbacks where the tests, this where i got hit the hardest. The writing will kill ya, basically you will spend every weekend wiriting.

The video lectures are good, and Dr. Joyner seems to really care about the course. Still, I absolutely hated it. The writing assignment are unnecessary long. The group project is basically assignment M1 to M5 combined to one, which means you repeat the same exercise with your teammates. The participation is what I disliked the most: To get that 10% of your grade, you have to write peer feedback every week, post on Piazza, etc.

If you are interested in learning about HCI, I would suggest just watch Joyner’s video lectures on Udacity. This course, in my opinion, is a huge waste of time.

Overall I think this class is great in terms of the material, the Dr. Joyner, and the lecture material. There are 10 assignments divided into 2 categories (5 M assignments and 5 P assignments). These assignments are capped at 8 pages and you will have one due each week. On top of this you will have to watch a few lectures a week (be sure to take notes as the tests are all open-book, open-note) and do readings. The readings here are what makes this class hard, not in terms of the material you have to read but the amount. I ended up just skimming the reading material before each of the 2 exams (which in my opinion weren’t hard if you took good notes over the lectures). At the end of the semester there was a personal project and a group project that you have to do, which aren’t bad as long as you stay up to date on the lectures and the material. Great course overall, really interesting and engaging lectures!

This was my first course during the summer semester. It’s a fast pace during the summer, with a paper due every week. You should enjoy writing or at least be willing to improve the practice of writing for this course. The lectures are great for teaching the concepts required for writing the papers. Your writing ability is not graded per se; just make sure that you follow the rubrics very closely of what aspects of discussion should be in your papers.

This class is well-run by Joyner. His enthusiasm for the material really comes out in the lectures and in Piazza. You could work ahead in theory in this course, but the assignments do all build on each other (the projects follow an alternating per week dual sequence of methods and theory subject matter). I definitely came away with a different understanding of what HCI is than I had going into the course, and I have been able to utilize perspectives from class towards work projects.

HCI is another Joyner course, so if you’ve taken other course from him, you know what to expect from the class organization and lecture videos. Everything seems to run on time and be relatively efficient, which makes structuring your schedule easy.

The primary thing to know about this course is that there is no programming whatsoever. Instead, you’ll be doing writing and some design. Lots of writing. Basically, you’ll have 8 pages * 10 assignments plus a 12 page project plus a 30 page group project. JDF format makes the writing pretty spaced out, and I personally can crank out an assignment fairly quickly, so this wasn’t a big deal to me, but if you aren’t comfortable writing 8 pages EVERY week, beware.

There are also a bunch of required readings. I usually don’t like to knowingly miss any points, but this in an exception. Just skip them unless you have a particular interest. You will never be able to remember them in enough detail to answer the exam questions on them from memory, so just skip them and ctrl+f the answers during the exam, even if that makes you miss a few questions.

I had no issue working on this course while working full time. You could probably double up with this course or use it as a first course since it has basically no pre-reqs.

The class is very easy and you don’t really need to do much work. I was able to just watch the lectures I needed to answer questions to write the papers and crt + f the video transcripts during the exams and get by. You could put in more effort if you like to but I was okay with a B and I still ended up with an 89% in the class.

Each week there is a paper that is due that alternates between a “P” and “M” topics. The “P” papers you will discuss concepts from the lecture videos. You can just look at what the question is talking about and then watch that video to answer the question. The “M” papers will take you through the design life cycle and each week you will write about a section.

At the end of the semester you will have two projects. Project P is similar to the earlier papers because it is mostly theory. Project M is doing the same thing you were doing earlier but now in a group.

Since you’ll be writing papers the entire semester and everything is formatted in JDF(Joyner David Format) I suggest looking into overleaf.com. It is a simple online latex editor and it made this class even easier. If you google JDF latex template you’ll find someone already created it and you just need to import it into overleaf. Overleaf is awesome because you get a free premium student account with your gatech.edu email.

Overall, class was easy, content was good but I didn’t really care for it, I just wanted an easy class I could take with low stress, would highly recommend if you want an easy A or B.

:)

A great overview course of UI/UX. A useful complement to the usual programming / theory heavy modules in OMSCS. Instructors are passionate, helpful and active on Piazza. Lots of writing. No group projects in summer.

You can front-load some of the work, but most of the work is cumulative. I would highly recommend reading the required readings ahead of time though. ProctorTrack was used, but it wasn’t overbearing like in other courses.

Lots and lots of writing. Be prepared to do lots of reading and writing. You’ll get as much out of the class as you want depending on how much reading and writing you want to do. Really cool format with reviewing the work of others. Professor Joyner is super enthusiastic and this is a well run class.

I really enjoyed this class, but here’s the thing: it’s a lot of writing! I loved the subject matter and the lectures, and even the design process that we went through for the projects was fun, but man, the writing assignments were a lot. I spent many late nights on these projects. You need to learn how to whip out 8 page papers in a few hours if you want to do especially well.

You are not your user!

I really enjoyed this course as a break from graded coding projects. I took it over the summer, when there was no group project, just the tests and homework assignments. The peer feedback system in this course was time consuming, but the same as other Joyner courses. I don’t mind it as much as most other reviews seem to mind it - it’s an easy 10 overall points if you don’t do any other participation activities.

I found the videos very engaging and entertaining, which seems to be rare in the program. I might be biased, since I came with an interest in how to design interfaces for the user and how to evaluate your interface design. The individual project was pretty fun to work through - I interviewed a lot of my friends to get some data on my interface, which might have been the most time consuming part of the course.

This class took a lot more work than I expected, but was well worth it. The pace started out extremely fast, but slowed down a little after a few weeks. Very well organized, great TAs, and Dr. Joyner was always available. There is a group project which can be hit or miss. Fortunately I had a great group. The concepts were immediately useful in my day to day job.

The course content is good, some of the ideas may not be directly useful to many CS students at first, but the core concepts are actually very important to all software engineers. Unless you don’t want to be a SWE, then this course is probably not useful to you. The core concepts are: machines should be designed to fit humans and consider humans’ limitations, instead of the way around. You can read more about this from the book as part of the required readingssssss Design of Everyday Things. There, I just said the core concept, and you probably learned 99% of this course.

Now comes the ugly part, Joyner tried very hard to structure the course, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but the course is still a mess. Although Joyner claims he is a cognitive scientist and bad mouthed the processor model, he did not practice what he preach. For example, he said the lecture videos + assignments require 3~4 hours each week and actually calculated the required time estimated for each subtasks. Of course, it is all bullshit. He underestimates the required time needed for each tasks. He said the required readings takes 1 hour, when he gave you 1 book, 1 article, 2 papers.

It used to be the assignments are easy and can be completed in 1 to 2 pages. Say goodbye to that because it is more like 6 to 8 pages nowadays. Anything less than 6 pages are probably incomplete, but not impossible. If you want to get A, however, 6+ is more realistic. The peer feedback system is bad, like, BAD. Joyner, in his paper, said that OMSCS students overwhelmingly hates peer feedback, yet he still doesn’t remove the system after years. He preaches good HCI using conventional behavior, but a lot at the latest Canvas design shows this is not the case at all. But I give him the benefit of doubt because it is the first semester using the new system Canvas.

The exams consist of 30 questions. The first 20 are from lecture videos, easy. The last 10 are from required readings. It is more like 1 question from each reading. Extreme waste of time. The posted examination statistics stated that the correlation coefficient between homework average and exam 1 is about 0.4231, which the highest score obtained was 146 (2 people), which the mean is 123.91 (out of 150). Standard distribution is 11.45.

What’s the verdict? Although this post it seems that I hate Joyner, actually no, he is still an amazing instructor, it is just that there are some rough edges readers should beware. I would not recommend this course. (you should just read the book and take another OMSCS course)

Now, if after all the ugly parts I wrote and you are still interested, here’s the good parts. Joyner is rated the best instructor for many reasons, he constantly look for feedback from users and improve on his designs, a thing he preaches in HCI (though I prefer the first version to be bit better than what it is currently). Also, the course is easy to get an A. It consists of busy works, which pumps this up to “medium” level. But it is easy to get an A.

30% comes from 10 assignments. 30% comes from 2 projects (of which one is group project), 30% comes from 2 tests and 10 from participation points.

The polls show that most get about 19~20 from assignments, and full 10 from participation points (giving peer feedback, posting on Piazza). So you will only need to aim for 85+ for projects and exams. Let’s say you receive 19.5 for all assignments, full 10 participation points, 90 points from projects (a very conservative estimate), getting the mean score of 123/150 for both exams are still enough to land you an A (90+).

95x0.3 + 10 + 90x0.3 + 123/150x100x0.3 = 90.1

Joyner if you are reading this, here are some feedbacks:

1. Please remove peer feedback system.
2. Please kill the research based required readings.
3. The assignments load are okay for 1 course per semester, but might be heavier than expected for those taking two courses at the same time.

Be prepared for lots of report writing. Exams are a little frustrating if you’re not the best at searching through dozens of documents at a moments notice.

Reports themselves are straightforward. Lecturers are engaged with the students.

Misaligned Priority on JDF

This is a very interesting course that really got my creative juices flowing. Such a well-designed course from David Joyner. What is really frustrating is the importance given to JDF format, which is nothing more than a document style.

After spending insane amount of time in getting the content out and getting the JDF formatting also in place, you can lose 0.5% a point for every 3% assignment all for some unnoticeable font somewhere. It is really splitting hairs.

I heard that it wasn’t this bad in the previous terms. Not sure if David would intervene to fix it

This course exposes the problem of education at scale. Excessive reliance on standard rubrics creates an army of drones who complete a step by step regimented execution of the tasks specified - but with limited scope for self direction, initiative or creative leadership. Do not take this class if you are a moderate researcher or self starter - it will frustrate.

Exams were a little trickier than anticipated. Too many essays. Becomes a grind. I’d focus on more design iterations.

Peer review is a lottery. And becomes a chore. The variance in backgrounds means not all opinions are of equal value.

Joyner cares. That is a massive plus. Not sure I agree with “you are not your user” - I would suggest you leverage personal insights, proximity to the problem and your artistic expression of a solution to create differentiated, bespoke products.

Overall, I will say this was a great course. The summer semester was condensed, but it didn’t require a group aspect. There was a paper due each week of the course, including the weeks with a test. The papers alternated between writing about topics from the videos and writing about the semester-long design project. The papers weren’t particularly hard, but it was extremely time consuming to sit down and write an 8-page paper thoroughly and thoughtfully. The content of the class is very interesting and is very valuable for anyone doing customer-facing work in any aspect.

Participation is required in the class, but quickly devolved into meaningless Peer Reviews and worthless Peer Survey answers by students looking to maximize their points. This made the papers rather difficult to iterate on without meaningful reviews because you likely will not get TA responses before the next paper is due.

The final project (for summer) is basically the semester-long project condensed into one 16-page paper spanning the entire design process.

The tests are on the difficult side and the required readings are very dry. Some weeks had 40+ pages of reading. The tests ask fairly specific questions about the readings and about the concepts covered in them. It’s possible to get by with skimming the papers, but this will waste a lot of valuable test time.

Everything except the tests can be worked on ahead of time, but it will require a lot of focus and determination to churn out that much writing effectively. If you talk about every point in the assignment outlines, you’ll likely get a good grade.

Dr. Joyner is a great professor and his courses are very well run. He makes expectations clear and lays thing out in a way that all you have to do as a student is focus on learning the material. This was one of the most impactful courses I’ve taken so far. If you approach this course from a strictly techie point of view then you won’t appreciate it. There is a lot of writing but being able to effectively communicate via the written word is a skill that MANY in this field are sorely lacking. That said, this course gave me an entirely new perspective on technology. Specifically, every new technological device that comes out is geared towards making some task easier for humans to complete. Whether that be Alexa or a self driving car the point of it all is to decrease the gulfs of execution between a user and their ultimate goal. This concept is part of the foundation of HCI as a discipline. I took this class in the summer and the pace was very fast. We had 8 page papers due every week in addition to exams and projects. It was a time consuming course but if you put in the work you will gain a lot from it.

HCI was a great course. The material was well organized and very succinct. I appreciate how Dr. Joyner has set up the class and the material was pretty interesting. This course involves no coding, but a significant amount of writing. Over the summer, there was an 8-page paper due every single week. This was my only complaint because the frequency of these writing assignments took away from the time to really understand and explore the material. There is a lot of required reading which does show up on the test. Overall, I’d recommend this course, but there are definitely elements that could stand to be improved. If you are interested in this topic, then I’d highly recommend this course.

This is a very good class. The material is applicable to the real world and the lectures and projects do a good job of applying the material to real world scenarios. There are 10 assignments each requiring at least 6 pages of writing. Plus a 15 page project. There is a lot of writing, but the directions are clear and there is plenty of material to write on. This class is very organized. David Joyner is active on Piazza and the TAs do a good job of answering questions. There are 2 open book, multiple-choice tests that are pretty easy. You will spend most of your time in this class writing and redesigning interfaces.

Pretty easy class. Lots of watching videos and writing papers.

A lot of writing. The lecture is informative. Learned a lot about interface redesign.

Take this course! I loved it, and it is so far my favourite course (admittedly only taken 3 at this point).

Dr. Joyner and his TAs did an incredible job running and managing this course. The lectures are entertaining, engaging, thought-provoking, and informative.

Piazza and Canvas are incredibly well organized and managed - the instructors did a good job of cleaning these up, consolidating posts, creating appropriate themed posts for each week to foster an incredible discussion-based learning environment for an online class. Just well done.

Exams are open note, open book, open internet, open everything. But they’re hard enough that even still the highest scores were still 92-97 range. I felt they were a good test of actually knowledge, but you would probably have just enough time to CTRL + F everything if you weren’t doing the readings or watching the lectures for whatever reason.

There was a written assignment due every week (up to 8 pages). They were varying degrees of enjoyable, but overall pretty good. 1 solo project was just a much more fleshed out written assignment (up to 20 pages), and the group project was the same but up to 40. Group projects are tough, but there’s a good system for finding teams with similar interests as well as checkpoints to make sure you’re keeping up. Last 5 weeks of the class is really only the group project then the test, so it seems a lot slower.

You are not your user!

You are not your user!

You are not your user!

This was one of my first courses (took it in my first semester with Computer Networks – they sort of paired well together since CN seemed to be slightly front loaded with the most time consuming projects in the first month, while HCI with its group project is more backloaded in terms of workload).

It was a good survey course into the various ways of thinking about Human Computer Interaction, in terms of established principles (Gulf of Execution/Evaluation from Don Norman, among many other ideas), and actual experimentation (individual, group project, which involved interviews and surveys among your peers and maybe family/co-workers).

There is no coding in this course, but there is a lot of reading and a LOT of writing. One of 3 my original group members dropped out of the course mid-way, so we had to pick up an orphan from another group to form another group of 3. I think you could form a group of 4 at max and the onus on you to get into or form a good group, which will definitely help out a lot in the latter stages and deliverables of the group projects. I did quite a bit of heavy lifting for the team, so I put in probably more hours than average.

The tests were largely dependent on the lectures and outside reading materials/academic papers (quite voluminous), so be sure to have those materials in searchable pdf format at the ready since the tests are open book.

Ended up with fairly strong A (96 or 97%), but there was A LOT of busy work (creating surveys, organizing your survey results, reading your peers papers and giving them feedback to max out your participation grade) and writing for this course.

Summer 2019

HCI is a very well run course. The teaching stuff really cares about the class and it shows. The material and assignments are very high quality and useful.

This class takes a lot of knowledge from psychology and it shows. You’ll read and absorb a lot of concepts that may or may not be familiar to you from different disciplines.

Structure

• 10 individual assignments (1 each week). 8 page written assignments.
• Weekly reading assignments. You have to read them as the tests have questions from the readings. Each reading is about 20-30 pages long and there are about 4-5 each week.
• 2 tests (open book). 2 hours each (most people take the entire 2 hours).
• 1 project. 16 pages.
• Participation counts for 10% of overall grade. Includes peer feedback, surveys, Piazza posts, miscellaneous activities.

Pros

• You learn a lot about HCI concepts.
• Professor Joyner and the TA staff are involved and care about the class.
• Excellent course material.
• You get to practice need-finding, prototyping, and evaluation techniques.
• Good exposure for software engineers who don’t normally deal with users and interfaces.
• Practice your writing and communication skills.
• Summer semester doesn’t have a group project.

Cons

• Lots of writing (a little too much to be honest). Every week you have an 8 page written assignment.
• Assignments and tests due dates overlap.
• Too many assigned readings. It’s hard to read all of them in detail.
• Pace feels unnecessarily rushed (at least during the summer semester).
• Weekly written assignments don’t count as much for your grade relative to the amount of effort they take to write.

Advice

• At the start of the class you will have to get a CITI Program certificate to perform social and behavioral research. Make sure to leave enough time for it as this certification takes a surprisingly large amount of time.
• Make sure to keep up with the weekly work. This means: watch the lectures, read the assigned readings, write the assigned peer reviews, and write the 8 page assignment.
• During test weeks do the same thing as the previous weeks but make sure to review all the covered lectures and readings.
• Have notes, slides, and all material organized during the tests. You are allowed to use all the material available but make sure you have actually studied it. The tests are long (30 questions) and are designed to test your understanding so do yourself a favor and study.
• Speed read through the assigned readings. There are too many of them to read them in detail.
• For the written assignments and tests make sure to answer all the questions and address all the points.
• Make sure to cover participation points by writing meaningful peer-reviews. If you don’t feel like writing peer-reviews, you could technically participate in 200 surveys and get your participation points that way.

Conclusion

The class can be categorized as “easy” but the amount of work needed to be successful at it bumps it up to “medium” difficulty. You will write a lot, you will feel tired by the end, but the concepts you will learn will be useful and well worth the effort.

This class is entirely writing and wireframe prototyping. I learned a lot about HCI, Dr. Joyner is an excellent teacher, and it seems like a proper jumping-off point if I wanted to do more research in HCI. The assignments are all writing and take a while, even if they are not particularly hard. There is weekly peer feedback for credit, which definitely reinforces the learning for each assignment. There are also Piazza threads for credit which can be quite entertaining and informative. There is one group project, but if you get a good group it is not too bad (basically applying everything you learned in the class in one shot). The test difficulty seemed to scale pretty linearly with how many of the readings you did. If you did them, you’d be fine. While time-consuming, it is not a particularly difficult class (other than time management) and I did learn a lot so I would recommend it.

Wonderful course - everyone should take this to learn how to think from the user’s perspective. It was perfectly planned, well executed. You could work ahead for the entire semester, except the two open book exams. It is a good amount of writing - the weekly reports, 2 projects do rack up the pages. It was a gentle introduction to being back in school again. I paired it with CP

You should probably take this class. Yes, it’s a lot of writing, but guess what? Companies want people who can communicate. It won’t kill you to write a few pages every two weeks.

Additionally, your interface design skills suck. They might still suck at the end of this course, but you’ll have improved and have a better awareness of how much you suck and even have an idea of what to do to come up with something decent. Almost all real-world engineers, including back-end folks have some degree of interface design, even if it’s just stuff designed for other engineers. Even if that’s the only sort of work you do, this class will still be helpful for designing better interfaces for them.

This class is one of your few opportunities to round out your degree with some soft stuff that is still practical. Take it even if you don’t really want to. It’s good for you!

Also, if you take it in the summer, there is no group project.

Additionally, know that there is a semester-long set of assignments where you work on designing an interface for something. I strongly suggest that you go into the class with a specific idea of something you would actually like to build in code in real life after the class is over. You will find the assignments much more rewarding than if you pick something you don’t actually care about just so that you can complete the assignment. However, even if you can’t think of anything, still take the class.

I really disliked this class. What’s strange is I really enjoyed the material and the lectures.

Maybe it’s me, as someone who really enjoys programming and solving hard problems, but I found this course very difficult for all the wrong reasons.

There are weekly assignments which turn out to be 8 page essays. The tests are pretty difficult multiple choice. And getting an A for the participation grade requires reading and critiquing about 100 other students essays.

As someone with an A in the high performance courses in OMSCS, I’ll be lucky to get a C in this class.

Again, I really enjoyed the material. I wish I took this course as a free Udacity course instead of a GT class.

This is an easy class as it requires zero coding, but lots of writing. It’s super well organized and I think having an understanding of HCI principles is very useful in industry.

I appreciate the classes’ final project flexibility - you can pick a topic you find useful. I focused on HCI of crowd compute platforms to generate training data for machine learning pipelines. It was a good excuse to read some design papers, a few changed the way I thought, and read up on literature for my topic.

Definitely pair this with another hard class, or take it as your very first class to get familiar with OMSCS.

Overall this is an easy, although very time consuming course. A huge amount of writing that just keeps coming each week. What I really dislike about this class is the exams though. There are 2 of them, and they are just unnecessarily difficult… It’s easy enough to understand and study the lecture material.. but they throw about 20 research papers each about 30-40 pages long at you prior to an exam and expect you to be able to recall detailed information from them. It’s open notes, and everything but it was still so much more difficult than it should’ve been for a course like this.

Summary: Do not take this class.
Detail: This is very unlike every other course in the OMSCS catalog. In fact, it’s more like an industrial design course. There is no coding, and a lot of writing. These things by themselves are not an issue. I came into this course with very high hopes, as Dr. Joyner has a great rep and I took another one of his courses - and loved it.

But this course is bad, especially if you get the wrong TA. The reason you see such divergent reviews is the luck of the draw on your grading TAs. Some are reasonable, some are not with grades. If you get a not-reasonable grading TA, your semester will be a long one. While they do their best to make criteria very clear, you can only do that so much with writing evaluations. And if you try to bring up an issue with grading, even a question - the head TA Ronnie Howard will not care much about it. The word “dismissive” is apt.

I enjoy writing and projects, really enjoy OMSCS in general, and cannot give this class a low enough grade. HCI has made me realize the quality of every other class I have taken so far by comparison. There are some really good things about the class that must be mentioned - structured pretty well, very interesting Udacity lecture videos, and Dr. Joyner is very involved. The professor obviously cares deeply about teaching.

I actually I took this course in Fall 2018, but I cannot select in semester field.
This course is good for first course. It is not too hard but you have to read a lot of material. Homework and exams require you to study a lot.

The lectures were great, but the Head TA Ronnie Howard is the absolute worst TA or instructor I’ve ever experienced. He just doesn’t give a fudge.

This is an easy course, but there’s a lot of activity and you will be busy nonetheless. I took it over the summer which might lead to an even busier schedule, but I actually don’t know. This is a very well run course, the material makes sense and if you put the effort in, you will learn a lot. There is no coding - but there is a lot of writing. I enjoyed the course a lot.

I really liked this course because HCI concepts like UI/UX design are really not taught anywhere formally. Prof. Joyner’s videos were really useful in practice and helped me in improving the design of my personal website. One thing I did not like about this class is that there are 2 tests which in opinion did nothing to help solidify the concepts learned in this course. The tests weren’t easy either (atleast for me) even though they were all open-everything tests. I wish this class had more individual projects (probably instead of the tests) which ask us to create/re-design interfaces based on concepts learned in the lectures - I think this will be a lot more effective in helping us learn skills that can be used readily. This is a must-take course if you are interested in designing products and if you want to learn how the reasoning behind how the interfaces we interact with every day are designed.

Comments about the coursework:
-all assignment questions are very interesting and take some time to answer as they require you to think about design concepts can be applied to real-world stuff (I liked the ‘P’-type assignments more than ‘M’)
-there are 2 project
–project P: individual project - you re-design an interface - easy and interesting to do
–project M: group project - you go through an entire design cycle - a lot of work - depends on your team.
-2x 2-hr tests (totally worth 30% of grade) - you need to study the lecture material + assigned readings properly.

Through this class, I learned quite a bit about designing effective and efficient interfaces and evaluating interfaces. Most importantly, I (re)learned that design is an iterative process that “never ends”.

This was a good first class. The amount of required readings seemed a bit too much initially but now that I went through “most” of them I’d say it’s manageable and the material is useful.

Tips:

• Do your readings early on during the week (DON’T let them pile up!).
• Do all your assignments! They are a good source of grade!
• Do your best on the group project. Be a team contributor.
• Participation points are basically free points.But you have to earn them. Post once or twice a week on Piazza. Do all your peer reviews early on during the week and take a few surveys when you have nothing else to do.
• Tests are easy if you’ve done your required readings. But even if you didn’t you should still be able to get a good grade.

• The course is very well organised.
• All the assignments and projects are essays, so it requires a lot of writing. There is no coding in this course.
• An important part of the evaluation is class participation. Class participation is done in many ways such as contributing to posts on Piazza, peer reviewing, taking surveys, etc.
• The content of the course is not difficult, however, the number of evaluations makes the course very challenging.
• The course is very interesting and useful. It really helped me to open my mind in all related to User Interface and User Experience.
• This course is very fast-paced, so it requires to do a lot of work every week.

Pros:

1. Very high quality materials and course design.
2. Constant load, in the main part.
3. Very clear hand-holding criteria for grading.
4. Intellectually non-demanding.
5. Students retain CITI certificates.
6. Doing PeerFeedback properly helps learn a ton.
7. Could be paired with other courses.
8. Instructor and TAs are very active on Piazza.
9. Tests are open-everything.
10. Easy workload after the start of group project (with a good team).

Cons:

1. Busy work, constantly high, but not demanding workload. Regular week: PeerFeedback (2 hours), Videos (3 hours), Required Readings (6 hours), Execute ahead some survey/interview (4 hours), Assignment (8 hours), prep for test or do project (8 hours, unlimited).
2. Huge spikes in workload when tests, assignments and projects overlap (4 times a semester).
3. Group project, aka lottery.
4. A LOT of required readings, which is impossible to thoroughly read through.
5. No one is doing PeerFeedback by the end.
6. Participation credit in general is a joke.
7. Tests are hard. 1+ sd above average is just below 90%.
8. Grading on assignments and projects is too generous and non-challenging.
9. No coding at all.
10. Huge amount of writing: 10 assignments 8+ pages each, 2 projects 30+ (more like 50) pages each.

Tips:

1. Start CITI, Projects beforehand. Ideally ASAP.
2. Prepare for tests beforehand.
3. Take notes on readings and videos. Could easily take you into 50+ hours/week. Only do glossary for quick search during the test of where term is coming from.
4. Don’t read and don’t skim readings. Stay in the middle.
5. Follow prompts literally for an easy 100% on assignments and projects.
6. Avoid appendices on assignments and projects.
7. Do not overdo on assignments and projects. Don’t dive too deep to save time.
8. Choose teammates early on Piazza, don’t wait for survey to come out.
9. Split the load on group project, avoid working together on something. Waste of effort.
10. Tests are very tricky, look for literal quote.
11. Test 1 is difficult on videos, Test 2 is difficult on readings.
12. Upload coarse assignment early to secure at least some grade.
13. References are not important. Don’t quote and don’t reference. Saves time.
14. Preload as much as possible.

This is a psychology course. You imagine interfaces and how people interact with them.

• No coding.
• Well organized.
• Written assignment (max 8 pages) every week.
• It is theoretical, not practical (meaning you don’t actually implement your designs).
• There are two difficult open-book tests that quiz you on minutia you read in the assigned readings.
• Everything is common sense, almost banal.

Every assignment is basically the same:

• Pick an interface. Imaginary redesign it. Write about it.
• Learn research basics. Redesign an interface based on research.
• Learn about ethical surveys. Redesign an interface based on a survey.
• Learn about design principles like ‘usability’. Redesign an interface focusing on usability.
• Learn about brainstorming. Redesign an interface based on your brainstorming.
• Now do it all again in a group.

It’s an undergraduate-level course with its emphasis on reading and regurgitating. The only slightly graduate-level part of this class was the part about formal research methodology and statistical analysis. You’ll learn more about research in this class than Ed Tech.

Other reviews emphasize the workload but I thought this was one of the lighter workloads. If you can write and imagine designs, the assignments are straightforward.

One of the best classes, this is my 2nd class with Dr Joyner as instructor. The videos and course work was great. Albeit tough as every week we had to submit about 6-8 page of assignments. Be aware of page restrictions as anything beyond a limit would not be considered for grading. Quick tips - use JDF for the assignments, make sure the fonts are right as Word messes them, stick to page limits, use references from weekly readings. Needs a lot of focus but you’d enjoy the term. There are 2 tests, 120 minutes long due to some miscommunication. But even that was not enough at times. Overall a great class.

I’ve taken 6 courses now, and I can say this is one of the best organized courses in OMSCS. This class constantly improves semester after semester, and the instructor David Joyner is super engaged and involved, he cares about the students. After taking this class, I can apply this systematic design lifecycle onto anything that requires a design, it’s really useful!

Interesting course without any coding.

I especially enjoyed the group project. The workload was not crazy, and I definitely learned a lot.

Course that takes great advantage of the online format. While there’s no programming, there is a lot of writing, which you have to budget a fair amount of time for. Enjoyable, however, and not very difficult.

Holy moley, this class has at least twice as much writing involved as any other class I’ve ever taken. I added up the number of pages I wrote over the course of the semester and it’s around 100. Granted, a lot of this content writes itself to some extent. If you address everything in the assignment description, you’ll get close to full marks. What’s great is that all of the questions in the assignments actually trigger meaningful thought on topics related to user interface analysis and the psychology of HCI. I’m someone who loves writing and loved the free reign that some of these questions gave to allow you to come up with a creative answer. It was a hell of a lot of work, but I genuinely enjoyed writing some of these papers.

I do think the amount is a bit excessive, though. If they cut it to about 2/3 of the writing, I don’t think you would lose much of the value in this class. I also felt that the group project was just a once-over of everything learned before. Not much gained there.

This was my favorite course in the program, and I’ve also taken the other Joyner classes KBAI and EdTech. This course takes top spot in my reckoning for the OMS program as a whole; this is coming from someone taking their last class.

As many have stated, this course and concept is not difficult, but the work required is pretty steep. The tests are also somewhat difficult despite being open book, open note, open internet, etc. They are designed to really check your understanding of the material and are fairly open ended. We had a 6-8 page single spaced paper due basically every week. There was one group project required with multiple check-ins toward the end of the class.

This class is focused on human psychology and interaction with/through the physical world, specifically with computers. There was no programming required.

As long as you stay on track with the homework and can keep up the pace through the semester, this shouldn’t be too difficult of a class. It is really just about staying on top of all the content that is offered. I really did enjoy the class and the prompts for the homework were good and really made you think about the concepts covered in the reading and lectures. The syllabus is tweaked from semester to semester, but you can get an idea of what you are in for by checking out this site, http://omscs6750.gatech.edu.

This class is good if you are on top of everything and your only class to focus on but if you dont like writing and reading papers, thats basically what this class is.

Pros

• Professor is engaged and supportive. Seems like a good person.
• Course website clearly outlines what you need to do every week to stay on top of this class.
• Not difficult to get an A if you can follow directions and write well.
• Rubrics are not ambiguous.

Cons

• Readings can be very boring. I started skipping them entirely midway through the class. The only readings I liked were the selections from The Design of Everyday Things.
• I did not get much value from giving or receiving reviews through the weekly mandatory peer review. It was mildly interesting to see the quality of others’ work, but I would prefer it to be optional.
• No coding at all. Many thought experiments and surveys.

Took Fall 2018, and it was a pretty good class. This was also my first class in the OMSCS program, and I would recommend this as a first course. That being said, I would still rate the class difficulty as “Hard” because I often spent around 20 hours each week working on the assignments.

While the class does not involve any coding, it requires 8-page papers responding in-depth to 4 questions from the lectures every week. On top of that, each week you have readings and postings to make on Piazza. In general, the class requires a lot of work, but is not too difficult. Since the papers are peer reviewed, I noticed that a lot of other students did not really put in the same level of effort (with many being less than 8 pages, so your mileage may vary).

There is 1 solo project (12 pages) and 1 group project (30 pages), as well as 2 open-note tests based on the lectures and readings. Neither test was too difficult, but they were timed (2 hours) and I definitely used all 2 hours. My only major complaint was that by the last week of the semester, I still only knew 50% of my grade (Test 2 and the group project were not graded yet), which was a bit unnerving.

Overall though, I really enjoyed the class, and think Prof. Joyner did an amazing job both with the lectures and on Piazza - it can just get a bit exhausting near the end after writing so many papers.

Loved this course. Dr. Joyner and the TAs were amazing. Now, I see everything as an interface!

This was my first course at GATech. There is zero programming, so it is great for someone who is not strong in that area. There is a LOT of reading and an 8-page paper due each week. There are prompts for the papers, and other than deciding on the topic, the papers generally write themselves. Don’t get fancy with the writing. Answer the questions they ask you to answer in the order they ask you to answer them.

There are two tests. They are open book. They brought my average down, but not enough to make a difference. (I averaged over 99% on my writing/projects, but 85% on the tests, which are worth 30%.) A HUGE frustrating part of the course is that you never get to see the exams, so you have no idea what you got wrong. Also, the questions were very open to interpretation at times, but you can never see if you were right/wrong in your answer, so that is very very frustrating. I wish I could tell you why I struggled on the tests (I was too literal in the interpretation of the questions, or maybe not literal enough – who knows???) Personally, I think this should not be allowed. There is no “check” on the system. You just have to take the professor’s word on your grade. Not good.

There are two projects. An individual 12-page paper and a 30-page group project. Not too bad because they follow from all the assignments that had been done up to that point.

Don’t let the low hours fool you. Some weeks I spent 20+ hours reading, writing, watching videos, doing peer reviews. There are literally 100-200 pages of reading to do each week, and 2-3 hours of video. Don’t get behind on the reading/videos! The reading, while at times boring, really helps explain the ideas of the videos. It all matters on the exams!! Readings are 1/3 of the exams.

Overall, great class. Great TAs. Great instructor. Very well-organized. Highly recommend it.

There is a lot of weekly work, but it is not difficult. Feels like busy work to be honest, but not difficult. Each week you have to write an 8 page paper, read some articles, and do peer reviews. If you follow the prompts exactly for the papers, then you can easily get 100% on the papers. If you actually do the readings it will take you twice as long as the prof estimates for the readings, unless you are very familiar with the subject matter already. Because of this I stopped reading the articles after test 1 and just skimmed them before the last test. You have to earn 100 participation points by the end of the semester, but I earned mine all by week 5 by taking classmates’ surveys. There are 2 tests, multiple choice, open notes/internet. Group project at the end was more hassle than it was worth to me because one of my group members was not participating and had no clue what was going on. Overall the HCI subject matter was really interesting but the busy work nature of the weekly tasks made me feel like I was just checking boxes rather than engaging with the material. If you don’t mind checking boxes for 15 weeks, I’d say this was by far the easiest of the 4 classes I’ve taken thus far in the program. It was an easy A.

This is not a difficult course. The subject matter is interesting and practical. I learned a lot of practical things from the course and became very sensitive to design - both the good and the bad. If you have taken a course with Dr. Joyner, you know how enthusiastic he can be, and how active he is in the forums. HOWEVER, I think the workload - especially the weekly assignments - is just a bit too much. Especially if you are like me with tendency to procrastinate but would really like to submit quality work. If you are a prolific writer, this course is for you. For 10 straight weeks, you have to write and submit a paper. Then for the last 5 weeks, you work with two of your classmates on a group project, and also write a paper for each of those (you can skip one). You have to review the work of three of your peers every week. And to really understand what is being discussed, you have to read two to three papers every week, which by the way are not too technical. There is no programming required in this class. There is one group project at the end.

Basis of grade:

• 30% Homework (10 of them)
• 30% Tests (2 open-book, open-notes, multiple choice proctored)
• 30% Projects (1 Individual; 1 group [5-week effort])
• 10% Participation (Piazza posts, peer reviews, surveys, etc.)

Majority of the students get an ‘A’. But definitely a lot of work, and not for procrastinators !!

This is a well organized and well run course. There is no coding involved, so it is a nice course to take after something like AI or ML if you need a break from the intense programming assignments. You are allowed to form your own group for the final project. Grading was fair and good feedback was given. Tests are open book/open note, challenging but doable if you keep up on the readings and lecture videos.

This class felt like a bit too much work. Not necessarily busy work, there was value in each task, but there are a lot of moving parts. There is an 8 page assignment due each week for the first 12 weeks, which gets a bit overwhelming. There are 3-5 readings each week (required for the tests), and they can be 30+ pages each. On top of that you are peer reviewing other classmates’ work and planning ahead for a personal project and group project. I would have liked to see the work consolidated a bit so that more focus could be given to each task.

Definitely a front-loaded course, the last few weeks were much easier (however I did have an amazing group for the group project, so that helps). I’d say it’s a good first course for OMSCS, but please don’t think this is representative of other courses in the program. I’m not sure I would recommend pairing it with another class, with the weekly assignments there isn’t much time in between for other work. Having said that, assignments are all released on day 1 so you can work ahead, with good time management two courses would be possible.

This is not a traditional CS class. If you are hoping to write code, explore robotics, or study algorithms this is not the class for you. This class is basically writing papers and interacting with humans. Each week, expect to write between 8 and 10 pages. The tests are basically 150 true/false questions but the tests are open book/open notes so if you take notes on the lectures you should do pretty well. Dr Joyner, the main instructor is a great teacher, he’s really kind, super geeky in a good way, and passionate about his field of study. The lectures are well made.

My biggest problem with this class is the content is basically a week or two’s worth of information spread out over an entire semester. The people who will enjoy this class enjoy writing papers, enjoy conducting surveys and analyzing qualitative data, and are not particularly passionate about writing code.

One of the best courses in OMS in my opinion. Dr.Joyner is probably the best teacher that I had. The lectures are very interesting and engaging and cover a lot of useful HCI topics effectively. Everything was well organized. This course requires a lot of writing as well as reading which can make it a bit tough if you are not used to that. I often faced frustration during the course due to writer’s block and not coming up with ideas and examples for assignments. This class touches many general human related topics, specially through readings so it felt like “real education” and not just topic learning. If you put good amount of effort then you can easily get an A grade.

Fall 2018

Good course but can get busy at times. Lots of writing and reading. Nothing is overly hard though.

Brilliant course to begin the program with. Had no coding but had to write a lot. I wrote about 100 pages of text combining all assignments and projects in the course. But I learnt a lot from the course on how to view things from a user’s perspective. The course is very well run. All the TAs and the instructor is super helpful on Piazza.

This was my first course in the program. For anyone who has been out of school for a while this a great introductory class to the program. It has heavy workload but as long as you watch the useful video lectures and more or less stay on top of piazza you should be able to succeed in understanding the concepts. Note the tests are hard and you need to review material beforehand. Otherwise Dr. Joyner and all TAs have gone the extra mile to make this course enjoyable and build a positive online community. Highly recommend.

Coming from a UX/design background this course is more of a refresher to me. The course is well structured and topics are closely relevant to the industry unlike many other academic classes. The assignments are a bit feels like busy work and can takes quite a bit of time each week. The workload gets easier towards the end if you have a good team for the final project. Exams are open book so you don’t really need to prepare for them.

The worst class in the OMSCS, tons of stupid writing, totally waste of you time. It can’t teach you anything useful about computer science, instead it will ruin you interest and mood because tons of pointless writing assignment.

Loved it! Will add a detailed review later.

The instruction lectures for HCI are relatively recent compared to some of the other OMSCS courses - this is great and shows how much GT’s OMS program has evolved over time. Dr. Joyner was the professor during the Summer 2018 semester, and his interest and enthusiasm for the class and the program as a whole does carry through via weekly updates, the discussions he encourages on Piazza, and via the video lessons.

This class is a good introduction class and a bridge between elements of Computer Science and Human Psychology which is not something I’ve previously been exposed to in a single class at GT undergrad nor GT grad. I’ve taken CS classes and Psychology classes, but never anything that merged the two.

It’s a course that is less technical and not focused on software or coding; instead, the class involves a lot of reading and writing. For many technical folks like myself, writing is hard and reading is slow, so be aware of that. Having some experience (novice level) with image manipulation or UI mockup tools is very helpful and fun. I now use these mockup & image editing tools in my day job.

If you took HCI as your first class in the OMS program, you might come away with the idea that all GT CS classes will be like this. Note that most classes expect more coding, strong programming skills, and “traditional CS” stuff. However, if you are taking HCI in between many of those “traditional CS classes”, it is a breadth of fresh air because it is so different than a “traditional CS class”. This is why I found it very enjoyable.

Great class. Lots of papers

HCI is an interesting course which provides a great overview of human centered computer design. The Summer version of this course included 10 assignments, 5 of which were focused on theory and 5 focused on method application. There were also two open book exams and a single individual project.

Overall I found the course enjoyable, but the workload was a little much at times for a compressed Summer course. You basically have at least one written deliverable each week on top of lectures and reading. If you’re planning to take this course, I would recommend getting a week ahead if at all possible to save yourself some stress. Otherwise, great course content. Would definitely recommend this course for anyone that works with interfaces or wants to better understand the human factor of technology.

This is one of the great courses offered by OMSCS. The profs and TAs both are helpful and the course is properly structured. This course does ask significant writings than other courses and there is an assignment almost every week, but its fun to do those assignments.

This is my 9th course and I can say that although this course is not extremely “difficult”, it comes with a huge workload, so be prepared to spend a lot of time completing all of the assignments, projects, readings, peer feedback, peer survey, activity on piazza, tests, certification, watching lectures, etc. There is a lot to do in this course, probably too much if you plan to pair it with another course while also working full-time. It could feel as if you are drinking from a fire hose at times. Be prepared to type until your fingers are sore, because you will type well over 35k words worth of essays by the end of the semester. You will type until you can’t type any longer. On the bright side, workload is much less during the last 5 weeks.

I thought that this class was okay. This class consists of purely design and no coding implementation. I personally am not a fan of writing essays and reading a few chapters a week for class. This class was pretty doable in the summer, but there was something due every single week which can be a pain sometimes. There are also a lot of opportunities for extra credit which can be done via Piazza or Peer Feedback. One thing that I did enjoy though was Professor David Joyner’s dedication to the class. He made new discussion threads almost every weekday during the week. I would recommend this class not necessarily as a first course but something to take early on in the program.

Probably one of the best courses in the class with respect to the lectures and the Professor leading the class. Dr. Joyner is definitely one of the most interactive and engaging professors I have ever had between on-campus @ GT and OMSCS. The weekly assignments are fairly easy but I would allocate ample amount of time to think about the “M” assignments as they require you to think about a specific task to redesign.

The entire syllabus is uploaded at the beginning of the semester, so you know what lies ahead. Tests are open-book, but test your knowledge pretty well. There is a lot of reading material required, but being open book, I recommend downloading them and having them searchable as it is just an absurd amount of information to remember for the test material.

The group portion of the project was eliminated for the Summer term, but I thought this actually served for the better due to my schedule. It was interesting redesigning an interface after learning the principles and why what we consider good designs are what they are.

Definitely a good course, especially now that it is a foundational course. I strongly recommend anyone who may ever need to create any sort of interface to take it.

Course is fun, but requires a lot of writing. There are two exams, which are open notes/lectures/internet.

I took this as my 3rd course in the summer term when expecting my first baby to arrive sometime in last few weeks of the course. I would recommend doing this in the summer term if you are “moderately” interested (not doing II specialization) in the topic since there is no extended group project and thus a bit less work compared to the regular semester. I was able to finish the entire coursework about 4 weeks early (except Test 2 which was opened a week later). The class is entirely essay/test based so if you want a break from coding/debugging for a term this is one to take. I personally find that coding assignments are a bit more unpredictable in time commitment than writing assignments so this is a great class if you need to front load/work ahead as I had to. Baby ended up coming after I finished Test 2 so we timed it right!

I thought the course videos were well done, the projects and assignments were interesting and covered many academic disciplines. Some of the papers felt tedious to read, though most were interesting - knowing content of readings is 50% of each test. Overall, I feel like I am much more conscious of interface design and felt this was a practical course for a professional software engineer.

1. Excellent Course! It covers principles & methods of HCI. You would look at interfaces & designs differently after this course :-)
2. Dr. Joyner rocks!
3. He is very active on Piazza & and communicates very well with students. His class is very well run & engaging.
4. I am so glad i took this course & would highly recommend it.

WARNING:

1. Do not underestimate the effort for this course as there is an assignment due every week!
2. In one of the weeks, we had Assignment and Test due back to back. So plan ahead & do not slack.

I felt like this was the most useful course (career wise) that I have taken thus far in the program. The ability to analyze software critically and in technical terms cannot be overrated. Even if you have a good understanding and intuition for interfaces, I guarantee you will improve dramatically in this course. Even if you do not work with interfaces (I mainly work in machine vision, c++, and python land), you will still benefit from the ability to think critically about how you can make APIs that others can use effectively.

Finally, and most importantly, you will come to appreciate everything from a properly marked door, to a well designed car radio, to dragging folders around on your desktop, to any other technology you interact with day after day.

Bonus points:

Dr. Joyner is awesome, and actively contributes to the class. I forgot how much I missed student-teacher interaction before I took this class.

All assignments were graded very quickly, and grades are assessed honestly.

A very excellent course! When I first enrolled in the course, I thought it was going to be a UI/UX course. However, it’s more than just that. You will learn how to design surveys, how to perform qualitative and quantitative analysis (such as setting up hypothesis testing) among a lot of other things.

The subject material is pretty challenging. You will learn “principles” and “methods” and then apply them to an area of research you have chosen and write weekly essays to demonstrate your knowledge.

Participation points can be earned in a number of ways. It’s sort of like an all-you-can-eat buffet. You can participate in surveys, contribute to discussions in piazza, do peer feedbacks on others’ essays. You can do a little of this, a little of that, or whole lot one thing until you hit the maximum 100 points (for 10% of the grade).

Exams were not easy. I think the average on the exams were ~85%, which means the average student had to do better than 90% on everything else to get an A, since the grading was straight scale.

The professor, Dr. Joyner is by far the best professor I’ve had. Truly knows what’s he’s talking about, and very passionate about the subject. You will learn a LOT in this course. Every student in the program should take this course.

This is a lighter course but the material is intersting and unique in the program. The course has you go through two main modules: HCI principles and HCI methods. The principles covers the high level concepts and cover ideas in usability, psychology, user modeling, and design heuristics. The methods section goes over different techniques you would employ in a user-based design process. The schedule switches between these two every week so one week you focus on principles and the next week you focused on methods.

Each week has one small project (called assignments) that focus on the material being covered that week with a total of 10 assignments. Principles assignments were more general and asked broader questions. The methods assignments required you to go through redesigning an interface and most people focused on the same interface (though this was not required). There was also a semester long project that required you to redesign an interface but required you to do a wider range of tasks than the methods assignments. There were two tests that are open book, open internet with 2 hours. They were hard but not impossible. I generally studied very briefly for them.There was also a strong participation requirement. Most people fulfilled this with a mixture of participating in surveys and doing peer feedback. Some people didn’t like this, I did.

Overall, this course is well-structured and the teaching team is engaged. The ideas are very different from many of the other courses but I found them stimulating (the concept of distributed cognition was especially intriguing to me). There is a lot of writing involved so be ready for that but if you are interested in a course that is lighter on the coding while still being interesting, this is a great choice!

This was a really interesting class, with no programming whatsoever. Took the course in the summer, and as a result there was no group project. Weekly work consisted of written assignments (~1600 words), reading book chapters and journal articles, and watching lectures, as well as background work on the project and doing peer feedback reviews. Nothing too intense at once as long as you worked steadily throughout the term - it could be easy to fall behind on the project or more time consuming weekly assignments (ones involving surveys and interviews), and no late work is accepted. The content was very interesting so I found it easy to succeed in the class, but there is a constant stream of work with weekly assignments that can feel burdensome at times. I think you could work ahead and take a week or two off if you needed to, but I wouldn’t recommend doing that! Overall an interesting class that is well-run, a great option if you’re looking for a break from programming.

I took this Summer 2018 (was not available in the semester dropdown).

This was my 3rd class and favorite so far. The professor is dedicated to the students and very involved in the class. It was my 1st class where the professor wasn’t just a figurehead, like the Queen of England. The lectures are fun and engaging while also being easy to follow and understand. I feel like I learned a huge amount about HCI during the course and I’m able to apply all sorts of new concepts at work.

Assignments build on the material nicely and all the information you’ll need will definitely be in that week’s lecture. They are a fair amount of writing but not a brain strain as long as you watched the lesson. One set of assignments builds on itself each week almost like a project, while the other set is 5 stand alone assignments.

There are 2 tests using Proctortrack, a midterm and a final. They are 100% open book, you can use whatever resources you want (even existing Piazza posts) outside of communicating with another human being during the test. Reading the articles prior to the test made absolutely no difference in my grade because I couldn’t remember the details being asked about, I did the readings for the first test and got the exact same test score on the second test having not read any of the readings beforehand. I felt that many of the readings reiterated what had already been taught during lecture so I’d recommend only focusing on the ones that give a bit more detail on a topic you’re confused about or especially interested in.

The final project was totally doable and not too time consuming but I highly recommend getting started, or at least reading it over and laying out a plan a few weeks early. I think it could definitely be done all in one week but I chose to conduct a survey for part of mine and would have been rushed to get responses and then do the work if I’d waited until the last minute. We didn’t have a group project this semester thankfully, so I can’t comment on that.

Overall I really enjoyed this class and appreciated the fact that I was able to learn a huge amount without being overwhelmed and stressed to the max 24/7. It’s a great beginner course to get your feet wet in the program and would pair nicely with a 2nd course if you’re doing 2 at a time. Highly recommend!

This was my first summer class and I loved it. The only thing that I would change are the readings, they are required for 1/3 of the test and even if you read them thoroughly, you would have to check the papers again during the test, which is open book. I did the readings for the first test and skip them for test 2, my score was exactly the same.

The class provides a full calendar in advance with all the activities and estimated times for each one, these estimations are more or less accurate. If you are not an excellent writer you better multiply those times by 2x.

Great class over summer, especially as the group project was changed to an individual project. The lectures and readings are all really great and you will learn a significant amount. Really great class for those taking technical classes as it teaches you how to design and think about interactions with applications. __ An easy class is not a bad thing. It means the class is well taught and easy to understand. There is a tremendous amount of material and reading and things you will learn from the class. I highly recommend all students in the program to take this class. More classes in the program should be as well taught as this one. __ Time crunch near both exams, expect double the time per week during those weeks.

I’ll echo everyone else: well designed and operated course. Dr. Joyner was active except for when he was away for a conference. Too many readings made worse by a shorter schedule.

I was initially very excited about the assignments but gradually became disillusioned. The grading made it feel like an exercise to hit all the questions without regard to actual content. There were assignments that I poured everything in and got disappointing grade because I missed some tiny details. On the other hands, some of my phone-it-in assignments got 20/20 and/or exemplary. shrug

Even though my overall grade was very good, I didn’t feel enlightened like I thought.

Overall, Human–Computer Interaction is a very good course that I highly recommend. It is cross–listed as both a Computer Science course and a Psychology course, and they pair nicely. The course also helps develop two very important graduate–level skills: research and academic writing. I believe both should be required for graduate–level CS students. And if you have any intentions of pursuing a Ph.D. or writing an academic paper, this course will help you to develop the necessary skills.

The course is challenging, but will not bring you to tears with mathematically complicated equations or difficult to comprehend algorithms. So, from that perspective, it’s not difficult. But there is a LOT of writing and reading, and a lot of material and concepts to learn, digest, understand, and apply. You will read several academic papers and write reports weekly. If you are comfortable writing – especially academic papers – you won’t have any trouble with this aspect of the course, outside of making sure you allot ample time for the work.

In terms of projects; we had one individual project and did not have a group project in the Summer 2018 session. The project brings together everything learned throughout the course. It was very fun to pull together. Time–consuming? Yes. Rewarding? Yes.

Because we ended up writing 11 papers for this course, I now know that I can write about 150 polished words per hour. So, I have a personal metric. If I need to write a 1500–word paper, I should expect to put in 10 hours of work. Add to this: 1) the time to watch the videos(1–2 hours), 2) read the papers(1–5 hours), 3) perform peer reviews(1–2 hours), and 4) work on your project (1–3 hours), I was easily at 20 hours per week. That said, when it comes to time estimates, it really is a case of “your mileage may vary” and I know others who put in half the time I did and performed quite well.

Grading this term was straightforward and effective. Nothing out of the ordinary, but I know our grading approach differed from prior semesters.

Dr. Joyner (David) is a rock star! He was HEAVILY engaged and easily approachable on Piazza and on Slack, with replies measured in terms of hours (sometimes sooner). Although this is a MOOC–style online course, his approach made us feel connected with him as an instructor. I highly recommend this course. And I’m looking forward to taking other courses with Dr. Joyner, beginning with KBAI in the Fall.

I have not human factors background which increased my workload. Great material and I learned a huge amount from this class. Highly recommend it for anyone in software development. You build a project up through the semester and then have a final project that often during regular semesters include a group component that wasn’t done over the summer class.

Really did enjoy this class. I wouldn’t recommend it to be paired with another class because the workload is kind of a lot. There are a lot of readings that are kind of boring, but the lecture materials are pretty interesting. 2 Open book tests and about 10 1600 word papers which sounds like a lot but you’re given usually 4 or 5 prompts so you get to that word count rather quickly. Dr Joyner is really cool too and always active on Piazza.

Pros:

• Incredibly well organized with plenty of documentation on the course website.
• You can work ahead - I finished all assignments and the project two weeks early because I had a vacation planned.
• Nice break from intense coding (I enjoy writing, but this may differ for others).
• Great class engagement and communication from Professor Joyner on Piazza.
• Gave me a new perspective on UX/UI design that benefits the work I do at my job.

Cons:

• Emphasis on learning terminology.
• Overwhelming amount of reading assigned. I did not have time to read everything, and doubt many people in the class did. The exams are open book so I was able to look up what I needed and did well on both tests.

Overall, I would highly recommend this class and believe it is applicable to nearly all areas of computer science.

Overall, I liked this course. It’s not the most interesting as you are going through many years of theory and learning how to apply that theoy instead of building software in other courses, but it’s nice to go from coding to writing every once in a while.

Although grades have not come out yet, I expect to make an A in this class. That does not mean I liked it, though. The class I thought I was taking would have dug into specific examples of good and bad human-computer interfaces, exploring the subtle wins of a good interface and picking apart bad interfaces and re-doing them to make them better. The class I actually took was a tedious slog of papers and terminology and grad. assistant research training. The one good thing I’ll say about this course is that it ran like a Swiss watch: Everything was done timely, the materials were correct and made available well in advance. And being able to work ahead was very helpful with my demanding work schedule. Unfortunately, the content of the course was as dry as dust, which is disappointing considering the exciting advances being made in this area these days.

I loved this course. David Joyner is a great teacher who clearly cares a ton about the course. We had one solo project, 2 exams, and 10 homework assignments for the 12-week summer term. This is a little different from what is usual due to the compressed timeline. You can find a ton of information on the course website: http://omscs6750.gatech.edu/

The most important thing to know about the course is that it is all writing and zero coding. I was a philosophy major as an undergrad and had no issue with the writing, but others seemed to struggle. We were expected to write on 3-5 topics per assignment, and usually had a ~1500 word limit per assignment overall. In total, the most you were supposed to write for the assignments was 14,000 words, with a recommended length of 10,000 words. The project was another 2,000 words recommended, and you were capped at 2,400. If the idea of writing 17,000 words scares you, don’t take this class.

The exams were quite reasonable. The median grade clocked in at around 85% for both exams, and David gives an obscene amount of statistics and analysis on the tests. It was really cool to see.

Your grade is 35% homework, 20% project, 35% tests, and 10% participation. You can get participation in a bunch of ways, such as Piazza, peer feedback, and completing surveys.

Over the course of the course, you follow an entire design cycle in the homeworks. I found this to be a really rewarding experience from which I learned a lot. I also really appreciated the readings, which were quite interesting and not particularly long.

I would say the course was medium-to-easy. I struggled with some serious health problems during the course and was force to take an incomplete as I couldn’t finish the project on time, but I found the assignments quite manageable and wouldn’t have had an issue if not for the health problems. That said, I was a philosophy major and so was much more comfortable with the writing than many of my classmates.

I spent about 12 hours a week on the course, of which 7 was spent on homework + projects, 2 on lectures, and 3 on partipation and auxillery things like skimming the papers. I didn’t really read the papers until I was studying for the exam. There, I binge-read them all and then skimmed them during the tests (the tests were open notes).

I get like it was a really good course to take over the summer, and it was a welcome break from Hardcore coding (I had taken GIOS the previous term). I would definitely recommend taking it if you’re looking for a technically light course that will teach you interesting and somewhat off-beat things. There’s a solid chance some CS people won’t find all the psych stuff interesting, but if you’re generally into learning or think psychology is cool there’s a lot of nearby content to learn here.

My third class, but my first summer class. While the course was not difficult, there was a lot of required reading and time spent watching videos. Part of this might have been due to the condensed nature of Summer schedule. Overall the course was fun, but would have enjoyed it more if I had taken it during the Fall or Spring.

Overall, this was a very informative and enjoyable course. Dr. Joyner does a great job of trying to keep improving the program and he is active in responding to any questions.

There are two tests (all multiple choice) that is open book and relatively straight forward (not necessarily easy). All assignments and projects are graded relatively fairly. Make sure to synthesize the learning and incorporate lecture notes.

Grading is generous relative to other courses; however, you do need to commit the time and effort to get the A.

Definitely a great course to start the omscs program! Be prepared to turn in an assignment every week for 10 weeks, watch lectures which are engaging and informative and read a few papers each week. The course is doable provided you do what is required of you each week. You also have the ability to work ahead as videos/assignments/readings/projects are all laid out and accessible from the start of the semester! The most challenging part of the course were the tests as they are a little tricky especially when it comes to the structure of questions.

HCI course is one of my favs in this program. You have the opportunities to explore a whole different world of Computer Science area. I personally learnt a lot from this course. This is an essay-based course. You would expect many readings and writings. But it was fun. This is also a great course to take with some other heavy coding course in one semester.

Although this course does not have any programming assignment, it actually has a very heavy workload. Every week there is one assignment due which requires 1,200 words. The instructor David is very passionate about this course and he is very active on Piazza. The grading policy is very generous.

I thoroughly enjoyed this course, and it really changed my perspective on how to design interfaces. Dr. Joyner is a fantastic instructor, and this course was one of the best I’ve taken in the OMSCS program.

Before I took this course, I had a vague sense of what made a poor user interface, and this course teaches you the underlying principles of usability and user-centered design. After the course, I can now analyze and articulate how an interface could be improved based on user-centered design principles.

The course has two main lesson tracks that were taught in parallel: Methods and Principles.

Methods focuses on the process of conducting HCI research such as understanding regulations about testing with human subjects, performing needfinding (understanding needs of the user), brainstorming approaches, prototyping, and evaluating designs. All of this is comprises the design lifecycle.

Principles focuses on the design principles in HCI, such as the Gulf of Execution (how the user figures out what they want to do and how to do it) and the Gulf of Evaluation (did the interface respond how the user expected?). You also will learn about concepts that improve usability and the limitations of users (human abilities). This was my favorite portion of the course.

Assignments: Weekly assignments were due that usually required 1200-1500 words of writing based on that week’s lecture content. I found these assignments to be easy but useful. I usually spent 3-4 hours writing each assignment, but the Methods assignments required outside work that took a few hours to perform (conducting needfinding with others, developing prototypes, etc).

Tests: There are two tests that cover the first half of the course and the second half of the course. The two tests are open-book and open-note (including Udacity and papers) extremely straightforward (not necessarily easy), but there’s no trickery involved or gotcha questions. Dr. Joyner provided a terrific analysis after the exams to identify problematic questions and other potential test issues.

Projects: There is an individual project and a group project where you go through a round of the design lifecycle by yourself (individual project) and then as a group (group project). These projects primarily reinforce the material in the Methods lectures as you practice what you’ve learned in them.

tl;dr: Excellent course. Not super difficult. Very enjoyable. Great if you want to learn more about designing good UI/UX.

First, let me say that this class is great. You will learn a lot if you’ve never taken a course on HCI. Dr. Joyner is very active, both on the slack channel and the Piazza forums. He is very helpful and I will take other courses by him. There is very little TA involvement though.

About the course: There are 10 assignments that are basically reports. They require around 1600 words per paper. These are fine and will help you understand the material well. They can get a bit boring after awhile though.

There are two projects. The individual project isn’t difficult at all and I felt it was just like another assignment. The group project was a repeat of 5 of the assignments you had already done, but now in a group. If you can choose your own group. My group was fine, but didn’t communicate well. I felt that I did a majority of the work.

There are too many readings. They start off interesting and get worse as you go. I quit reading them after the midterm because I needed to spend more time in another class. By doing so, my midterm grade went down 10 points. This implies to me that they aren’t that important.

The tests are open book. I found them to be rough. We got two hours to take them, but I think in the future they will only be 90 minutes. Anyways, I didn’t do the readings for them and still got a good grade, but I used all two hours and they were open book. If the tests are not two hours in the future, you may want to make sure you do the readings as I always ran out of time when I searched through the readings for the answers to test.

Overall, great class. Loved it and Dr. Joyner is fantastic. I highly recommend this class. It would make a good pairing with a second course.

This was an excellent class. The videos were some of the best int he OMSCS program. They were very clear and built on previous information in an interesting and coherent manner. Prof Joyner is very involved in the class and actively improving the content. He is very open about why he makes changes and answers questions very quickly.

I have had several UI design classes before, but this was the most comprehensive with key areas highlighted clearly in ways that will stick with me for a long time.

I took this course at the same time as Intro to Health Informatics and was able to combine group projects for both courses, making the group projects more manageable. It didn’t reduce the workload significantly, but allowed us to focus on one project and go into it in more depth than we would otherwise have been able to.

All assignments were posted at the beginning of the semester making it easier to fit schedules where you need to front load work or where you’ll be unavailable in the middle of the semester (though you still need to coordinate with your team for the final project).

This is a great course but does require you stay current with the assignments and weekly readings. Be prepared to do lots of writing and designing. No coding.

Pros: High quality lectures Consistent writing weekly assignments Grading is more than fair

Cons: There are a lot of weekly readings which are often very dry and easy to fall behind on. If you do then you’ll regret it on the exams.

** AS OF SPRING ‘18 THIS IS BOTH AN II ELECTIVE AND A FOUNDATIONAL COURSE **

A fine class from Dr. Joyner, who stayed involved throughout and should be a model for the profs in other courses who basically let their TAs run the asylum. 10 weekly assignments, one individual and one group project, two totally open book tests, and a ‘class participation’ grade (point for Piazza posts, peer reviews, and participating in surveys by other class students). You are assigned three student papers at random weekly to review; these peer reviews are likely the least effective thing in the course with many of your fellow students offering a whole sentence or two as ‘feedback’. You also have 3-5 required readings each week which reinforce the Udacity lectures (well done by Dr. Joyner, updated frequently). There is no programming required.

The basic course structure entails learning the principals and methods of HCI, with weekly assignments being split between the two tracks. Assignments are used to demonstrate a grasp of concepts prior to the projects which put you through re-designing an interface of your choice. Workload is manageable, allow a couple of hours for the readings, 1-2 more for the lectures, anywhere from 2-6 for the assignment/projects. You do have to allot 4-6 more hours early in the semester to take mandatory Collaborative Institutional Training Initiative (CITI) training.

The grading system is a work in progress; this semester, assignments and projects were graded on hard A-B-C-D-F basis with an equal number of points for each grade (e.g. for a project worth 150 points, each grade gets you 37.5 points). Tests were multiple choice with you receiving 1 point for each answer you correctly selected or did not select. For some reason the grade scheme allowed basically anyone to get a B because the total number of points to get a B was 626 of the available 1000 points (63%). An 88% overall grade gets you an A. There was a TA shortage as the semester progressed (several had to drop for one reason or another), so grading slowed substantially the second half of the semester. The TAs were basically invisible other than grading and the very occasional answer on Piazza, but their absence was not felt because Dr. Joyner was so engaged. NOTE: Dr Joyner today (6May18) said that this will be the last semester of the letter grade experiment, so expect a return to traditional point-based grading.

This was a very enjoyable course thanks to the energy and enthusiasm Dr. Joyner displays for the material and online learning. The material was interesting and the concepts are certainly something you can use in real life. This course was just added as an II elective and I would recommended it for those seeking that specialization.

Check out http://omscs6750.gatech.edu/spring-2018/ for more information.

Lecture material is fantastic. The examples and explanations are well-chosen and clear.

The individual assignments are good, but I think there’s too many of them. All assignments are writing assignments with ~1200 words. I felt like I was jumping through a lot of hoops each week to complete all the assignments. I like the P Assignments on design (P)rinciples better than the M Assignments on (M)ethods. It’s a fun course overall, and it gets you thinking about how people interact with technology in the real world.

Lots of required readings. Questions on the exam cover lectures and readings. I recommend taking notes on the lectures and the readings since exams are open-note.

Like all of Dr. Joyner’s classes, the communication on Piazza is well-organized and constant. The course hums along smoothly. The grading was a bit slow this semester, but many TAs fell ill or dropped off which is understandable.

Definitely recommend this course!

Great course! I highly recommend taking it. It will require writing a lot of papers, but you will learn a lot.

Pros:
Lectures are high-quality
Course material is well organized
Instructors are responsive on Piazza

Cons:
If you actually do all the required readings you will probably need more than 10 hours per week. I have mixed feelings on the readings. Yes they add value, but to me it was not enough value to justify the time spent reading everything, taking notes, looking up terminology, etc. Fortunately you don’t need to memorize the readings (tests are open-notes).

Overall this is a good course. If you are very interested in HCI then the readings will probably be engaging for you. If your perspective on this course is to be more well-rounded through an introductory exposure to HCI, then you don’t need the readings but don’t totally ignore them because they are included on the tests.

You don’t need to write any code for this course, but you will be writing a lot of English : )

It was my first semester. The course is learning about the design process of software from scratch. The course include great concepts that can be applied to software development process. The course has a lot of writing around 800 word per week. You do not need coding for this course, but you need basic drawing skills to make prototype or design template. I really recommend this course to sw engineers, it help a lot when you create application.

My biggest mistake was taking this class along with another one. It should be noted that when I took this class, I had already satisfied all other requirements for graduation outside of 3 electives, so needless to say I am very burnt out.

Dr. Joyer is great, and probably one of the best OMSCS professors. He is very active in Piazza and slack and gives you meaningful feedback, and detail on why he does what. During this semester they tried a new grading scale, where for projects A’s were all 100%, B’s were 80%, C’s were 70% and so on, meaning that there is no way to get a 90% or a 85%. I didn’t really like this because it seemed to penalize borderline work IMO.

Overall this class was a lot of work. It wasn’t technical but there was always something due. I felt pretty overwhelmed after a few weeks of trying to balance two classes. I am not sure if this was always the case, but I felt that the previous reviews were sort of a lie.

Great class but lots of writing and work.

An easy-going class with interesting but not technical material. The instructor is very good, always engaging and supportive. I really enjoyed the class at the beginning but towards the end I favored my AI class more because I found it more interesting. There is a fair amount of writing you have to do for this class, and a good amount of thinking and choosing different interfaces to analyze - which wasn’t always easy.

Very easy class, but it does involve a lot of writing and doing peer feedback that nobody reads. Take this class if you want to boost your GPA. I think 70+% of the people who took the class ended up with an A in the class. Don’t get me wrong though, it’s a lot of work, but not difficult work, just a lot of busy work.

The course is not difficult, but in my opinion it’s about the effort that you put in. Some others that I spoke to were spending less then 5 hours a week on the course and they did well. I personally spent around 15 - 20 hours during the first few weeks of the course and steadily was able to reduce my time to around 8-12 hours towards the last month or so. The readings are lengthy at times and there are multiple to get through. I found it hard to digest and remember the opinions of each author/researcher, but getting through the readings helped me to better understand the theory behind HCI and the many views around it. Coming from a computer science undergrad and working in industry as a software engineer for several years, this class definitely helps as I have been on the UI/UX side more times then I can count and it’s an area that I find doesn’t get enough attention in many of the companies I worked with.

The course has no programming, completely theory based. For the final project, if you want you can build a working prototype. In summary, this course is writing, writing and more writing. There are 10 assignments and 2 projects. There are two types of assignments P-type and M-type, P is based on principles and M is based on methods. Lectures are very engaging and drive home the concepts very well. If you have already working in UX and/or designing great apps, then this course will be a cake walk and you just need to spend only 5 to 6 hours per week. However, I come from an embedded background with no UX experience, so all the concepts were new and I needed more time. The strategy that works best is to choose a domain and a problem in that domain that you want to solve and a few apps that you can review. You watch the lecture on a Monday, read the questions to be answered for the assignment, internalize the concept and apply them on everything you do in the next three days, then just reflect on your experience for the questions asked in the assignment. We have two proctored exams and they are a bit tough. Take proper notes while watching the lectures and diligently read all the weekly readings. The readings were made compulsory from Fall 2017 and 1/3 of the questions in the test come from those. As I didn’t do the readings, my test scores are not great. This can be easily taken along with another intermediate course, if the other one is full of programming like CV or AI then this writing will complement the heavy programming.

A great class .. tells you a lot about the interfaces we deal with … I think its a must class for anyone trying to go the entrepreneurial route of developing any mobile app .. you’ll know a lot about what distinguishes a good interface from a bad one. Its a theoretical course, where you’d have to write a lot.

Instructors are extremely responsive .. Effort from them is clearly visible .. There are 10 assignments; each due Sunday of every week, 1 individual project (more like an assignment), and 1 group project ( which you’ll do with 2 other people, and spans over a month). There are 3 peer feedbacks required every week for previous weeks assignments of your classmates, which will count for yours participation grade. There is 10% participation grade. You’ll have to gather participation tokens by filling out surveys from your classmates, which they’ll post for their assignment and projects at piazza. A tip is that at the end of class, people share multiple tokens for their surveys (like i offered to share 6 tokens to get my group project filled in). There are 2 Tests, each valued 15% of your grade. Include the course material you’ve completed uptil now , and the assigned readings. There are 30 questions in total (1 point each) and 1 extra credit question (10 points), so a total of 31 question. The extra credit question can bump your score to 85% only. which means, if your score is 75 - 84 % for 30 questions, the 31st question can bump it only to 85 % .. If you’re beyond 85 already, extra credit question will not be considered.

First of all, let me say that Professor Joyner is a great professor and the TA’s were great. Very responsive and understanding, and he always seems to be trying to improve the class. The lectures were expertly done and mostly enjoyable, and the content is useful and interesting.

However, for some reason I just did not enjoy the class overall. I believe the main reason was the assignments. I had to force myself to do almost every one because I always felt like the assignments did not improve my understanding of the topics from the lectures - they were just “busy work” to me. I gained a good understanding of the course material after watching the lectures but I found myself spending hours trying to brainstorm ideas to apply that material to the essay-style questions that make up the assignments. In other words, I spent more time trying to come up with interfaces to write about than time learning the material. My feelings towards this might stem from the fact that I am a coder at heart and there were not any assignments that leveraged that.

In summary, if you don’t mind doing a lot of brainstorming about different interfaces and writing about redesigns for them, then this class is great. If you decide to skip out on this course, at least bookmark the lectures and watch them in your free time - they are definitely worth it.

This is a very good class. Although it is a very easy class, the material is interesting. Dr. Joyner is an excellent professor and he is very engaged, so were all the TA’s. The projects are actually really interesting. I wasn’t a big fan of the group project. The assignments are easy, a lot of writing though. I would recommend this class if you are looking to get a good intro to HCI. This is a great class to take over the summer.

TL;DR: Good class, with an engaged professor, talking about interesting things, but the summer is packed and can cause some panic if you don’t adequately balance out your work.

As all the other reviews say, the subject matter is interesting, and the lectures handle it all very well. Each assignment applies a specific portion of the class which allows for you to solidify the content in the lectures.

The main negative I have is that the summer class felt rushed, and there was this heightened level of stress throughout the semester as there was something new to do every week. There is no breathing room, which I suppose is common for a summer course. It is possible to front load things early on, which is a HUGE plus to me.

NOTE: a review below says you have to fill out your own application to an IRB, that is not true. There is a class wide umbrella. You DO have to take an online class to understand what an IRB is, how it is applied, etc. That takes a couple of hours, and is MORE than just logistics. It teaches you the importance of the laws that surround research with human subjects.

If you work as a software developer and are responsible for building interfaces, this is a fabulous course to take. It’s also a must-take if you work (or would like to work) in a software startup and will have product development responsibility.

The first half of the class focuses on heuristics - what are characteristics of great design. The second half focuses on the design lifecycle. It gives you a process for designing and refining interfaces. It’s a very practical approach that I think maps very well to industry. It reminds me a lot of Lean Startup and how to arrive at a great interface using qualitative and quantitative data, and minimizing risk and time.

If you’ve taken a course from Dr. Joyner before, you know that he turns out a quality product and works continuously to improve it. This course is well-run. The lectures are to-the-point. He also has lots of “5 Tips for X” videos that help boil down the content to practical, actionable steps.

I found the grading somewhere between fair and generous. On your research projects, it’s also ok to have ideas that don’t work out, as long as you explore them properly.

All in all, a great course.

I found this class to be paced quite well for a summer offering. I tracked the time I spent on this class down to the minute, and spent an average of 9 hours a week watching lectures, doing assignments, or reading Piazza. This is definitely a class where you’ll get out of it what you put into it. There are extra reading assignments that you can do (for fun), you can interact on Piazza about questions offered up in the videos, and Dr. Joyner really tries to facilitate student interaction on Piazza. Also, these videos were by far my favorite in the program (out of 10 classes taken).

The assignments were generally pretty straightforward writeups that were directly correlated with the lectures. We learned and went through the design lifecycle over the course of 5 assignments (1 assignment/week). While parts of this felt a little rushed due to the need to get outside participation in surveys or interviews in a week’s span, the assignments themselves were light (~1000 words), yet informative. This class provided a glimpse into what it looks like to iterate through the design lifecycle with a focus on user-centered design, which I felt was informative and necessary for creating high quality solutions to problems.

I would be slightly concerned about a lack of rigor during the fall or spring semesters, when students have 6 extra weeks to move through the material, but I guess there is plenty of room to perform needfinding to a fuller extent or create higher fidelity prototypes. Even so, I would assume this would be a relatively light class, and could pair well with a more time-intensive class.

The summer schedule seems incredibly compressed. The first 3 assignments & the individual project were doable with the 1 week/submission schedule. However, the second phase of M assignments go through a complete cycle of a UI design, from needs finding to prototype construction and evaluation. Almost all of these all require input from an external group: either friends or family or the other students for the need finding and review activities. The same has to be done, this time in a group context for the group project. A little more time is allowed for the group project as it only has to be in at the end of the semester.

The logistics of that into a forced march of a 1 week cadence make this unworkable for me to integrate into work&school&travel.

I think if one is able to dedicate a non Summer semester to this alone, it could be doable. But for Summer, I think the course workload is unrealistic. Just too much logistics which detract from the content. It would be better to have a single project, with enough time to get all the reviewers logistics organized and submit towards the end of the semester. I don’t think it’s necessary to have a group project. Any advantages from a group can be had from allowing students to review the various steps, and better yet, be able to incorporate that feedback into your work. (The way a real review at work would be used).

BTW one disappointment is that in order to have a project you can use at work, you need to submit an application to an IRB of some sort. Again this throws in a logistical detail, as something like cannot be organized within a week, yet, that’s all you have if you keep to the 1 week cadence. Without some incredible foresight or preparation, the whole thing is unworkable for a custom project. You basically have to take a play project, and use your fellow students as the users.

BBTW I seem to be writing about a different course than the people below, perhaps the assignments were reworked?

This was an excellent course.

The lectures are more rapid than other courses I have taken, I found myself having to pause and rewind in order to capture information. However, the quality of the lectures is perhaps the best I have ever experienced in OMSCS. (The only thing that bothered me was one of the fonts used - a carbon copy of my former employers’ corporate typeface that initially triggered some PTSD. ) The exams are open notes, so the quality of your own notes is very important if you want to do well on the exam. I still had to go back and watch lectures for a few questions, but having structured notes made it easy to quickly find that specific lecture.

Each week had individual assignments which usually take 3-4 hours if you want to do a good job and earn an A. There are word limits, so leave no word unturned and revise, revise, revise to fit that word count! Taking notes for all the coursework can be really helpful in your written work because you will need to refer to the concepts you learn in the lectures.

There is an individual project that you can complete over time, or within a week if you dedicate a few hours a day to it - I did feel a bit rushed to complete it before the deadline. There’s a team project, and of course, YMMV based on the strength of your team. Be ready to learn how to write surveys or perform interviews, which can be challenging if you are lacking in soft skills!

One of the more interesting experiences you’ll have with Dr. Joyner is that this is very much an “open standard” (not necessarily “open source”) course. When students post feedback about the course structure, or something that didn’t work quite right, Dr. J is extremely forthright about how he might change or improve the course. Since user-centric design principles focus on receiving feedback to inform iteration and continuous improvement, it’s no surprise he does the same for his courses.

The professor is fantastic! The class logistics are awesome– all assignments are graded within a week. The Piazza forum is attended to promptly. The assignments are more essay oriented than I was expecting. Also plan to spend time on getting the word count right.

I really enjoy the way Dr. Joyner teaches a class. Everyone seems to be generally interested in the subject which you can tell by the overall activity in Piazza.

I think this is one of those classes where you get out of it what you put in. It’s easy to get an A. But Dr. Joyner gives you all of the tools to really learn about the subject and explore the concept of HCI. You will get weekly papers where you have the opportunity to expand on previous designs. It makes for an interesting class.

Great class, taught by Dr Joyner, who keeps the course interesting and fun with his entertaining examples and engaging lectures. Also staying very active on the forum and ensuring that students understand the mechanics of the course and the material. It’s a fairly easy class, but I appreciated that because I actually had time to read the books, papers, and spend time going in depth into the area of project interests. Great class!

Liked the class a lot. Instructor is very good and the content is awesome.

The only thing I dislike about it is the assignments. Really, I think the assignments are graded by keyword and not whether or not you actually understood something. Example, in assignment M2, I think I tried to imply a concept demonstrated in the videos versus flat out mention it by name and I received a deduction for that. Assignments are also graded strictly with content from the videos meaning sometimes if a whole 20% of an assignment can come from 1-2 minutes of video lectures (screwed up in my opinion). If they can fix the assignments, the course would turn from good to awesome in my opinion.

Very interesting course. There was no coding assignment. All about writing each week for 10 weeks and 2 test covering the topics and 2 projects as well.

Very good course. Provides lot of very useful information about the principles and methods to be followed while doing human computer interaction design.

Course is very well structured and organized. The lectures are done quite well with an intention to make students understand the topic under discussion. The Professor, TAs and fellow students are very active and supportive in Piazza. Assignments, Tests and Projects are very thought provoking and highly oriented towards the material’s application in contemporary industry and practical life. Grading is exceptional.

Altogether, great experience and have learnt a lot from this course. Highly recommend taking this course.

The lecture materials were excellent. Communication with the professor is great. The assignments were thought provoking and interesting. One of the best courses in the program.

The subject was fascinating and the lectures did a very good job of covering the materials. If you ever wanted to know about Human Computer Interaction or what makes good design then this is a good course.

The professor was very good about communicating via Piazza which was a huge plus. The Piazza for this course was the most active and interesting of the courses I’ve taken. Office hours via Slack weren’t as successful but the professor was available and answered questions.

There are many assignments and they can each take a fair amount of time – especially the final project. The projects aren’t time sync’s the way some software projects are but plan ahead or you’ll find yourself spending a time at the last minute trying to get the work done.

This is an early review based on the first online offering of HCI in Fall ‘16. As I write this review, we’re only 10 weeks in the course.

I have a BS in CS, and this makes me familiar with some topics in HCI, such as Usability. I’d say it is an intro to the broad field of HCI. There is no prerequisite for CS 6750, and you’ll be perfectly fine with a different background.

The workload is very light at 15 h/w, more or less. There is one written assignment each week, which consists of four questions, and each should be answered with up to 300 words. Answering the questions requires watching weekly lectures, and reflecting on their objectives. These assignments are publicly available at: http://omscs6750. gatech. edu/fall-2016/full-course-calendar/

CS6750 is very different from code-intensive courses that have coding assignment (e. g. CS 6300 SDP). In HCI, you will describe and analyze user interfaces. I think everyone that designs computerized products should take this course. It gives you a different perspective to look at your tasks, and the interface you use to achieve your goals.

The Video Lectures are not publicly available, but you can view the Scripts at: https://drive. google. com/drive/folders/0B1-VjNQe61hsYi1YanNYYzdkd3c

In addition to weekly assignments, there are two exams that should be taken via Proctortrack. These exams are open-note; which means you may watch the lectures as you answer the exams, or review your notes.

Facts: No required textbook or readings. No coding assignments. Grades are not curved ( B >= 80, A >= 90 ). Instructor is very active in Piazza.

HCI should be perfect for Summer. It can also be combined with another course with Low-to-Medium workload.

Favorite OMSCS class so far. I learned a ton, enjoyed the material, the lectures were awesome, the assignments are interesting, and the tests are fair. The only thing I would ask to change is for their to be some variation in the assignments. They get kind of repetitive after awhile. 90% of the time you are asked to write 1200 words to answer 4 questions. The instructor and TAs are very active on piazza and they grade assignments quickly!

[This review was completed mid-term]

This is an excellent course. The content is interesting, it is very well organized, and the assessments and exercises are great. The work load is light. This course would be a good candidate for a two-course semester.