Lecturer: Prof. Dr. Kai Essig
Students know the main underlying principles of human cognitive abilities and skills, such as perception, learning, memory, information processing, decision making and motor action. They are able to apply this knowledge to the field of usability engineering and human-computer interaction (HCI) (e.g. in the usability lab) to understand the cognitive background of (inter-)action and decision making in everyday situations. Students will also learn how to design, apply and statistically analyse psychological survey and user evaluation methods in the field of UX and HCI, including analysis, statistics, and questionnaire design. This knowledge will enable students to pave the way for the design of new building blocks for more natural and intuitive human-machine communication/ interaction according to user's needs and abilities, e.g. in modern working environments.
Content:
- Learn about the underlying principles of human cognitive abilities and skills (perception, learning, memory, information processing, decision making and motor action).
- Principles of Interaction design from the point of perceptual-, working- and cognitive psychology (affordances, distributed cognition, and activity theory).
- Practice in observation and survey methods: How to design, perform and analyse evaluation studies, e.g. how to select the adequate methods and study design.
- Basic knowledge on commonly applied statistical methods, such as t-test and ANOVA. Including on how to calculate statistics with commons statistic programs (such as SPSS or R) and how to interpret the results adequately.
Principles from work and organisational psychology/ occupational psychology (e.g. the design of user centred assistive systems in working environments).