Examples of bias Resume Study A resume study showed that resumes with white sounding names were more employable than black sounding names with identical resumes. “Job applicants with white names needed to send about 10 resumes to get one callback; those with African-American names needed to send around 15 resumes to get one callback.”...
I will give you a glimpse into what the contemporary research in human-computer interaction (HCI) looks like. I will show you several projects from around the world as well as several Harvard undergraduate theses. There is no required prep for today.
This lecture will cover trends in software design from the launch of early desktop operating systems to current mobile operating systems. We will discuss the inspiration behind some of these designs, the technological constraints that affect them, and how best to operate given this heavily developed landscape of visual metaphor. There is required reading...
Today we will have another visitor: Megan Quintero, a Product Manager at Uber and previously a Program Manager at Microsoft. Megan is also a CS 179 alumna. Megan will reflect on five specific projects she worked on and synthesize her insights from her experiences in the industry. If you are interested, you can read about Meg’s...
Today, we will have a guest lecture from Jannis Brea (Harvard class of 2010), a neuroscientist and a UX designer. Jannis is currently part of the BrainGate project, where she leads the design of the user experience for an implantable brain-computer interface. Previously, she worked as a UX designer for The Experience Engine and...
As part of today’s class, we will look at the phenomenon of implicit bias. Required prep: Take an Implicit Association Test (IAT) — you can pick any test you want. You will need about 10 minutes of quiet time. Note that the survey questions before and after the test are optional. You can skip them. Share...
In lecture 19, Kate Margolese talked about accessibility. What are our moral obligations as designers to ensure that our products are accessible to different people? Required reading (post your written response before class): Fragment of “Disability: Definitions, Models, Experience” (the document intentionally ends at the beginning of Section 2.1) Fragment of “THE INTUITIVE EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY...
Kate Margolese, the Senior Director of Strategic Programs at Perkins School for the Blind, will share several examples of using design thinking and understanding customer needs to develop solutions for different markets with a focus on blind and low vision individuals. Kate has an MBA from Harvard Business School and has worked in a range of...
There’s a lot of buzz around AI and integration of intelligent capabilities into systems these days. We’ll take a look at the past and present of intelligent interactive systems (both in existing products and in research projects) and will try to identify emerging design principles. Required prep (post your written response before class): Watch...
We will dive deep into low level aspects of human neuromotor system. From there, we will discover Fitts’ law, which will allow us to make quantitative predictions about how much time people would need to perform basic tasks with different interface designs. Along the way, we will empirically (and then analytically) answer one of...