Hide menu

729G85 Interaction Design and User Experience

Course information


Please note that this web page is not maintained after the course has started. The Lisam course room will be used for updates and news.

This is a course where you work in groups to do interaction design and user experience (UX) work for a real external client, alongside individual design work and reflection.

Intended Learning Outcomes

The student shall after the course be able to:

  • Conduct user research (data collection, analysis, modelling with e.g. interviews, people and scenarios).Examined in PRA1 and RED1.
  • Generate ideas and sketch concept proposals in interaction design. Examined in PRA1, RED1, and UPG1.
  • Evaluate proposals and argue for a proposal based on results from user research in communication with clients. Examined in PRA1 and RED1.
  • Specify requirements for, and sketch, develop and present prototypes of interactive products and services for a client. Examined in PRA1 and RED1.
  • Use design principles and guidelines in sketching and prototyping user interfaces. Examined in PRA1, RED1, and UPG1.
  • Conduct and present to a client the evaluation of prototypes of interactive products and services with regard to basic measurement and identification of problems in the user experience. Examined in PRA1 and RED1.
  • Make judgments in user experience and interaction design with regard to social and ethical aspects, such as gender and sustainability. Examined in PRA1.
  • Identify one's own need for further knowledge and expertise in user experience and interaction design. Examined in UPG1.

Course Contents

The course deals with professional process knowledge in interaction design and user experience (UX). It is especially focused on setting up and implementing a human-centered design process for interactive products and services from earliest ideas to tested prototypes. The course is based on design challenges from external clients.

Skills: Implement an interaction design process with customer and user perspective for a client. Design well-functioning interactive products and services at the level of prototypes. Study and evaluate user experience.

Topics: Basic concepts in human-computer interaction. Design principles as well user interface guidelines. Prototyping of interactive products and services. Design Methods. Different types of user interfaces. Methods for evaluating user experience and usability.

Technology: Prototyping tools (LoFi and HiFi) for the development of interactive products and services. Different kinds of interaction technology.

Course Evaluation from Last Year

This is the first time the course is given and there is therefore no course evaluation from last year. The course which is replaced by this course was perceived as too heavy and the workload per credit has been reduced in comparison to the old course.

Working and Teaching Methods

Lectures (Swe. föreläsningar) introduce or broaden the perspectives given through the readings and seminars. Lectures are held in Zoom and a link to the meeting for the course will be announced at the Lisam course room. Lectures describe what, why and how of a certain topic. Smaller exercises are also conducted at some lectures. Groups will be presented at the first lecture. The lectures are:

  1. Introduction to Interaction Design and UX
  2. User Research and Design Objectives
  3. Dos and Don'ts for Design Consultants
  4. Ideation and Concept Selection
  5. Interaction Design Principles and Requirements Specification
  6. User Interface Sketching and Design Patterns
  7. LoFi Prototypes and Formative Usability Tests
  8. Visual Interface Design
  9. HiFi Prototypes and Summative Usability Tests

Presentations (Swe. redovisningar) have compulsory attendance and will be held in Zoom. Links to meetings are announced at the Lisam course room. The two first presentations are held as critique sessions with two project groups at the time. The third and final presentation is in full class. Critique sessions are conducted around a show-and-tell format about produced materials. Two groups have presentation at the same time so that learning may occur between groups. The ones who present should think about what kind of feedback they need. The ones who listen should give constructive critique on the others group work. For the presentation, every group has 10 minutes for presentation and 5 minutes for critique (good and bad). There are three presentations:

  1. Concept presentation (critique session)
  2. Revisions presentation (critique session)
  3. Final presentation (full class)

Workshops focus on exercises that are prepared by the lecturer. They will be in physical meetings in half class (in accordance to the current guidelines from Folkhälsomyndigheten). The three workshops are:

  1. Radical concept ideation
  2. Sketching madness
  3. Test my product

Supervisions (Swe. handledningar) focus on what has been done, in relation to what is expected by the course examiner, and what the next steps should be. Prepare questions that you may have for the teacher. We expect all students to attend supervision sessions, and if someone repeatedly is missing, we will consider that an indication that something is wrong in the project group. Supervisions will be with two groups at the time in physical meetings (the room is specified in the timetable at TimeEdit). There are three supervision sessions:

  1. Concept phase supervision
  2. Detailing phase supervision 1
  3. Detailing phase supervision 2

Group work (Swe. grupparbete) in the practical design work is done in groups of approximately five students. You have a group room in the course Lisam room, but you are also free to use other means of communication (i.e. Discord, Slack, Miro, Mural). The work includes also collaboration with different user groups and stakeholders. There is time in the course time table marked as group work (without teacher and without a lecture hall) for the groups to use as they please.

Individual work is required in reading up on how to do the practical design work in the group. There are also individual assignments (UPG1).

Cod of Conduct for Distance Education

This code of conduct is written to clarify what we as teachers expect of you as students during distance education, and what you can expect from us in turn:

  • Online sessions should be treated as any other educational activity; respect the teacher's and fellow students' time and focus fully on the educational activity without other distractions.
  • Everyone should join the online sessions in a timely manner, i.e. a few minutes before the scheduled start, so that it can start on time.
  • For live lectures and seminars, students and teachers should always have a web camera feed on.
  • Everyone should mute their microphones when not speaking.
  • Everyone should join online sessions using a stable connection to prevent drop-out issues. If anyone lacks or has unreliable home wi-fi, that person is expected to find alternative solutions (e.g., joining from a room on campus using Eduroam).
  • Everyone must be mindful of speaker turn taking during the seminars, and make sure that everyone gets the chance to talk. Hand raising functions in Zoom can be used for both seminars and lectures to indicate that you wish to say something.
  • To prevent Zoom-bombing, passwords will be used for live sessions. Do not distribute these passwords to anyone outside the course.
  • If you are not already familiar with Zoom, take a look at the guide available at LiU's website.

Communication and Feedback

Lisam and e-mail will be used for asynchronous communication from the teachers to the students. This web page at the IDA-server will not be updated during the course.

Formative feedback on design process and design product is given orally during supervisions and presentations. Feedback on the individual assignment is of a summative rather than formative nature.

Course Literature

Reading the course literature should be done continuously during the course.

The following book on visual design is mandatory reading (available electronically through the university library):

  • Schlatter, T., & Levinson, D. (2013). Visual Usability: Principles and Practices for Designing Digital Applications. Morgan Kaufmann.

Choose one of the following two books as your main book on interaction design and UX:

  • Arvola, M. (2020). Interaktionsdesign och UX: Om att skapa goda användarupplevelser (2. uppl.). Studentlitteratur.
  • Benyon, D. (2019). Designing user experience: A guide to HCI, UX and interaction design (4. ed). Pearson. (We will use Part I and Part II.)

If you use Benyon's book and not Arvola's: Choose one of the following two articles to read on sustainability and design:

  • DiSalvo, C., Sengers, P., & Brynjarsdóttir, H. (2010). Mapping the landscape of sustainable HCI. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '10) (pp. 1975-1984). ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/1753326.1753625
  • Lou, Y. (2018). Designing Interactions to Counter Threats to Human Survival. She Ji: The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation, 4(4), 342-354. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sheji.2018.10.001

If you use Benyon's book and not Arvola's: Choose one of the following two articles to read on gender and design:

  • Wong-Villacres, M., Kumar, A., Vishwanath, A., Karusala, N., DiSalvo, B., & Kumar, K. (2018). Designing for Intersections. In Proceedings of the 2018 Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS '18) (pp. 45-58). ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3196709.3196794
  • Wikberg Nilsson, Å. & Jahnke, M. (2018). Tactics for Norm-Creative Innovation. She Ji: The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation, 4(4), 375-391. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sheji.2018.11.002

Page responsible: Mattias Arvola
Last updated: 2020-08-18