Challenges for Master Programs on Human-Computer Interaction (HCI): experience report of the M2IHM

1. INTRODUCTION Since the advent of personal computing, the average user expertise with computers is constantly dropping. Accordingly, user interface effectiveness has become increasingly important in software development in particularly because this aspect can determine the adoption or rejection of the whole software [1]. Actually, the user interface occupies a very important part of design and development tasks in modern software development [4]. Aware of the fact that designers and developers need appropriate training to cope with users’ needs and expectations towards the user interface of interactive systems, the Association for Computing Machinery1 (ACM) and the International Federation for Information processing2 (IFIP) hold permanent working groups for promoting the education on Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). The occurrence of HCI courses in undergraduate programs is essential to present concepts (e.g. usability, accessibility, User eXperience) and techniques (e.g. prototyping, user interface evaluation) necessary for designing user-centered interactive systems. In the last years there are an increasing number of undergraduate programs in Computer Science that propose courses of Introduction to Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) in their curriculum. However, these courses rarely exceed 40 hours, which is barely enough to prepare students to work as usability professionals. In order to cover this gap, specialized master 2 programs have been created in the last decade around the world (see the list of HCI programs provided by Gary Perlman [5]). It goes without saying that the success of graduating programs on HCI is related to an increasing demand for usability professionals. The interests of the industry can easily be measured in terms of internship and job offers. However, there is a paradox: whilst some companies look for professionals with very specific skills (e.g. usability evaluation methods, development of multimodal interaction techniques, etc.) to fill a position in development teams, others have little knowledge on HCI so that they recruit professionals to initiate a usability culture inside their organization. Moreover, graduate programs should cope with companies’ expectations in terms of required technological background (e.g. mobile, Web, multimodal interfaces, etc.) and knowledge on the idiosyncrasy of the application domains (e.g. safety-critical systems, airspace, e-government, etc.). There is no point to teach everything so that educators must find a balance between what to teach with respect to student’s jobs perspectives. In this position paper we report the experience gained through the creation of a Master 2 program on Human-Computer Interaction (M2IHM). Section 2 provides a view at glance of the organization and contents for the M2IHM and, in particular, the place that occupies the teaching of Web technology. As we shall see, Web technology has been taught since the beginnings but it is not a dominant aspect of the M2IHM. Section 3 illustrates the evolution 1 ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Human Interaction: 2 IFIP Technical Committee on Human-Computer Interaction (TC13): Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Conference’10, Month 1–2, 2010, City, State, Country. Copyright 2010 ACM /00/0010…