Featured image: Lecture Hall - Photo by Dom Fou on Unsplash Overview I created and have directed the CS(HCI) undergraduate programme since 2012, building the University of Manchester’s unique interdisciplinary Human-Computer Interaction degree. The programme combines units from Computer Science, Psychology, Design, and Business across 3 faculties into a deeply scientific and research-led undergraduate experience. Programme Innovation Unique Characteristics The CS(HCI) programme is distinctive in several ways: Cross-Faculty Integration: Combines units from 4 schools across 3 faculties Requires no additional specialist units or teaching Leverages existing courses in novel combinations No financial overhead while expanding student choice Scientific Approach:

Featured image: Post-its and UX Planning - Photo by UX Indonesia on Unsplash Course Description In this unit, you will come to understand User Experience (UX) as it relates to software engineering and agile practices. The unit is a very high overview (there is no coding, maths, or other aspects you may feel comfortable with) intended to enable you as a Software Engineer to discuss development with UX professionals, or to help you create a bridge between the users and the engineering team.

Publons In an attempt to take notes on stuff I’ve read (similar to Mark Bernstein does for books) - I’ve adopted Mendeley as my reference library manager (love the BibTex support). I’m also investigating Publons to make paper review notes with too! I suppose that producing notes helps me remember the work and investigate its useful ness to my current projects - I also note that I’m not doing a lot of consuming notes but I’m hoping that might change as I’s like to be able to get notes attached to the papers I’m interested in.

UoM Logo I’ve been banging on about this HCI programme for a year or so now. It has been looking increasingly like it will happen and this week we got a glowing report from our external programme examiner (from industry, actually) which seals the deal. So we now have a programme taking entries including the units that you can take and we even have 4 flavours; BSc and MEng both with Industrial Experience options meaning year long placements with vetted companies!

I was recently asked by Research Councils UK ‘What are the key future challenges that UK HCI researchers can address and how can the UK research be better placed to contribute?’ Well apart from RCUK actually funding some research I thing it is by providing the research to inform industrial development; instead of often trying to build an industrial product ourselves as a demonstrator, or indeed, as the whole project.

As per normal, my short and mostly unheard rant about HCI and WWW! This year we did have some HCI under the title ‘Social Web UI’. Two other session did look promising, ‘User Behavior in OSN’ and ‘Behavioral Analysis’, but alas no, miss titled in mine, and other HCI’ers opinion. These were mostly ’throw tweets at ML/AI’ and wait. Social Web UI was the only viable option. So what did we get?

When you’re part of a hard core Engineering School it’s sometimes difficult to convince your fellows of the importance of Teaching HCI to Undergraduates. However, here at Manchester we’ve been given the go ahead to try and put together a full Undergraduate Programme in HCI - but we need your help to convince our faculty that here is a desire for HCI teaching at an undergraduate level. That’s where you come in…

Yes it sounds strange but a key to lung cancer survival is early presentation to health services and evidence shows this can be influenced by information from various sources. The internet is a potentially cost-effective means of disseminating information, 60% UK adults access it almost every day although there are socio-demographic differences in use. Internet use is growing in that part of the population at highest risk of lung cancer and penetration via internet based interventions is becoming increasingly possible.

Briefly, counting the number of visible edges on a web page is a good indicator of the perceived complexity of a web page. There is a lot more to it than this obviously… Ranking Scores from Manual and Computational Algorithm - Line The perception of the visual complexity of World Wide Web (Web) pages is a topic of significant interest. Previous work has examined the relationship between complexity and various aspects of presentation, including font styles, colours and images, but automatically quantifying this dimension of a web page at the level of the document remains a challenge.

The other week I was asked to prepare a one page overview of HCI in CS here at Manchester (for the EPSRC) - it seems to have evolved (may evolve) into the beginnings of a manifesto in part. You may find it interesting… - We see our work as ‘Core HCI Research, Applied Across Disciplines’. - We are interested in how users interact with the Web and how the Web, through its design and technology, enables users to interact with it (including Emergence & Evolution).

“These commissioning constraints not only have a direct bearing on the decision as to which methodologies to use but also how the evaluation design is created.” I’ve recently been thinking more about the real world problems of UX and HCI evaluations for a book chapter I’m writing on how it’s really done. Textbook approaches to experimental design, and the choice of research methodologies, often rely solely on selecting the best methodology for the job at hand.