Usability and User Experience, 7.5 credits

Usability and User Experience, 7.5 credits

All Courses Architecture and Design

The course aims to provide students an opportunity to develop skill in experience design and design thinking. The Usability and User Experience course focuses on the design process, techniques and methods to design and produce digital artifacts with desirable experiential qualities.

Responsible: Mälardalen University (Rikard Lindell)

Course modules:

  1. Usability and experiential qualities. The user experience of a digital artifact today consists of many experiential qualities. This module discusses the more complex situation faced by experience design today with many and sometimes conflicting experiential quality goals. The module provides techniques and methods for the initial part of the design process.
  2. This module covers techniques for realizing a design. The module will also discuss different techniques and methods to validate a design and its experiential qualities.
  3. Basis of theory of science. Experience design is based on an interpretive epistemology and phenomenology. A user interface for a digital artifact can be designed for different purposes, such as business or pleasure. This affects the course of philosophical concepts of pragmatism, utilitarianism, and hedonism.

Learning outcomes: The student should after course completion be able to:

  • demonstrate the ability to apply the design process for designing interactive digital artifacts focusing on user experience and experiential qualities,
  • demonstrate the ability to conduct user tests to evaluate a design,
  • demonstrate how the design work is based on scientific contributions in the field,
  • design and develop interactive prototypes and digital artifacts focusing on user experience and experiential qualities,
  • demonstrate the ability to make assessments with consideration to sustainable development, norm criticism, and scientific, social, and ethical aspects of interaction design, and
  • describe basic philosophical concepts and scientific philosophy in experience design.

Related industrial challenges addressed in the course:

  • Develop and attend to the experiential values throughout the development process.
  • Handling of engineering epistemology with basic science versus the practice based design epistemology.
  • Apply design thinking within the organization to develop products and services.

More info:

  • Course title in Swedish: Upplevelsedesign och användbarhet
  • Course code: DVA451 at MDH
  • Course syllabus at Mälardalen University
  • More information and application instructions at Mälardalen University
  • Admission requirements: 120 credits of which at least 60 credits in Computer Science and / or Informatics. Applicants with at least 12 month (full-time) documented work-experience from software development have priority in the selection process.