welcome

Introduction

Human-Centred Computer Systems is an exciting and unique Masters course offered by the University of Sussex. It brings together aspects of cognitive psychology and computing and draws a fine balance between the interdisciplinarity of cognitive science and the detailed technical skills required for software engineering. With an excellent combination of both practical skills and the theoretical knowledge to reinforce these, students gain a thorough knowledge of the subject area together with direct experience of a range of methodologies for the design and evaluation of interactive computer systems.

This website details a student perspective of the Masters course; including views on the individual course modules and a more personal standpoint on the place that HCCS has taken within our academic and professional lives.

About the Website

This website was created as part of a compulsory course, Interdisciplinary and Group Processes (link to website?). This is a unique course which embodies the interdisciplinarity found in HCCS design and evaluation, and teaches the practical skills necessary to bring together people from a range of backgrounds. The foundational concepts of the course are highlighted through the practical side of the course assessment, which was for the whole class to create a website for the HCCS master’s course.

This website describes the HCCS master’s course in detail, highlighting the parts felt by all the masters students to be the most significant when looking at the HCCS course at Sussex. The website provides both objective information and also more personal views on aspects of the course, such as:
  - the background to the masters students
  - the course modules
  - how this masters will be utilised by people upon completion

HCCS

Even though computers have infiltrated nearly every aspect of our lives, there is still a vast disparity between the way that they are designed and the way that a user would like them to be. Human-Computer Interaction is a diverse and constantly-evolving field. A range of methodologies detailing techniques for human-computer interaction design have been created since the emergence of the field in the 1980s, most being based on how users, designers, and technical systems interact. Early methodologies treated users' cognitive processes as predictable and quantifiable. This promoted design practitioners, when designing interfaces, to incorporate cognitive science research results in areas such as memory and attention. However, more recent models tend to focus on iterative feedback and communication between users, designers, and engineers and encourage technical systems to be focussed upon the experiences desired by the users, rather than creating user experience around a completed system.

HCCS is a unique course which goes beyond computer science and brings in aspects of cognitive science, psychology and sociology in order to understand and implement instructive systems’ analysis, design and evaluation. Situated in the Informatics department it presents ideas from the emerging fields of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), knowledge engineering, cognitive and user modelling, computer-supported cooperative working (CSCW), and human-centred system design. At the end of the course students have an excellent background in understanding the issues surrounding usability and the relationship between humans and computers. This fusion of disciplines is reflected in the backgrounds of HCCS students, who each contribute to the course from differing perspectives.