Human-Centered Design

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Overview

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Small tech startups, large corporations, and even government organizations are all beginning to recognize that creating solutions for their clients must go beyond simply producing functional and useable products/services. To best support their populations, designing tech solutions to problems must be more than functional. They must be more than usable. Solutions must be designed to maximize the totality of the experience that a person has with the designed solution.

In this program you will learn concepts, tools, and techniques, needed to design and develop information system solutions that will maximize the experience of those who will use your solutions, enabling you to work in a myriad of real-world roles that require designing IT solutions for clients. Program coverage includes important information to better understand how humans perceive, understand, and function in the world. In addition, this program will introduce you to techniques and tools to show you how to effectively gather and analyze information about the people you are designing for as well as tools and techniques for designing and testing IT solutions.

In this program learn what is needed to design solutions to maximize the users’ experience people with your solutions. Topics include understanding how humans perceive, understand, and behave, gathering/analyzing info about users, and designing/testing possible IT solutions to human problems.

Syllabus

Courses under this program:
Course 1: Data Gathering for Human-Centered Design

This course is designed to introduce you to the ways and methods that IT designers, developers, and researchers discover who they are designing for. Our focus will be on techniques for collecting and analyzing data so that designers can develop a sense of empathy to not only better understand the people they are designing for, but to also better understand the problem they intend to solve from a human-centered perspective.

Course 2: Designing Human-Centered Solutions

This course will introduce you to the ways in which we can discover solutions to human-centered problems with the overarching goal of maximizing user experience. We will focus on the methods that will help us understand how to develop IT solutions that will, as close as possible, map to the solutions that potential users both need and want.

Courses

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6 weeks, 5-7 hours a week, 5-7 hours a week
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Small tech startups, large corporations, and even government organizations are all beginning to recognize that creating solutions for their clients must go beyond simply producing functional and useable products/services. To best support their populations, designing tech solutions to problems must be more than functional. They must be more than usable. Solutions must be designed to maximize the totality of the experience that a person has with the designed solution.

Achieving this goal must begin with a rich understanding of who we are designing for. The better, more complete and holistic understanding of our users as well as anyone that can be directly or indirectly affected by what we design, the more likely we can match the solution with the mental model of our users/stakeholders.

In this course you will learn concepts, tools, and techniques, needed to gather data to better understand who you are designing for so that you can develop information system solutions that will maximize the experiences that users/stakeholders have with those solutions, enabling you to work in a myriad of real-world roles that require designing IT solutions for clients. You will learn concepts like the utility, usability and user experience, why it is important to understand who a system is designed for, and why it is important to deploy a diversity of techniques to truly get as complete a picture of your users and stakeholders as possible.
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6 weeks, 5-7 hours a week, 5-7 hours a week
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The introduction to the general population of things like the PC and the World Wide Web, resulted in the democratization of IT solutions. Computing power and access to information is no longer just in the hands of experts and/or the elites. This shift in focus started to reveal some important gaps in development approaches. While traditional views of development helped create a disciplined, structured, and standardized way of making a functional system, in today’s environment we place the primary focus, not on making the system functional then making users adapt, but rather making the human functional and building the system to adjust to them.

This course, therefore, arose from a perceived need to change and adapt to a new development mindset and how we might first approach a problem by examining the user and how they might best be served. Once we a have done our best to understand as much as possible the humans we are designing the solution for, then we begin to address how we can build a system that will provide the appropriate support and functionality for those humans.

This course will introduce you to the ways and methods of developing IT solutions from a human-centered perspective. We will be introduced to the stages and processes that designers and developers must go through in order to make a system image match as closely as possible to the mental model that our users and other stakeholders have for what that system should be. With a solid empathetic understanding of who our users are, this course will introduce you to various techniques for determining, (1) do we really understand the problem from their perspective; (2) can we envision possible solutions to that problem, and (3) how close is “our” solution to “the” solution to the problem?