hcde 313: introduction to user research

313 and 417 are different courses

people assume the research courses are variations on one another. they aren’t, and the difference is what makes teaching both worthwhile.

• 313 is generative, 417 is evaluative. here students go and find out what people need before anything exists to test — interviews, field observation, and the slow work of turning what they heard into a claim. 417 hands them a product that already exists and asks whether it works.
• the deliverable is a written report, not a set of findings and severity ratings. 313 is one of the department’s few genuine writing courses, so a lot of my feedback is about organisation and argument rather than method — whether the evidence in section three actually supports the claim in section one.
• the hard part moves. in 417 it’s writing tasks that test the interface instead of the participant. in 313 it’s scoping: choosing a research question a ten-week project can actually answer, which is the thing most students arrive underestimating.

how i came to it

i took hcde 313 as an undergraduate in this department, then came back to ta it for dr. gary hsieh, then co-taught it. knowing the assignments from the inside is most of why i can help a student who’s stuck — i’ve been stuck on that exact assignment. it also means i can tell them which parts got easier for me later, which is usually more useful than telling them it’s fine.

what students learn

• asking a question that can actually be answered. the hardest part of the course, and the one most students arrive underestimating.
• interviewing without leading. silence, follow-ups, and resisting the urge to finish someone’s sentence for them.
• observation as data. what people do versus what they say they do, and how to record the difference honestly.
• synthesis. getting from a pile of transcripts to a claim you can defend.

how i work with them

• one-to-one during work time. this was never formally my job as a ta and it’s where i was most useful — sitting with a team on a half-formed project idea, or reading through an interview protocol line by line before they take it into the field.
• weekly office hours and quizzes, plus summarising the mid-quarter feedback so the course could respond to it inside the same quarter rather than the next one.
• research as a relationship. participants are people who gave you their time. that framing changes how students write consent language, ask questions, and represent what they heard.

the goal isn’t to produce students who can run an interview. it’s students who notice when they’ve just heard something that contradicts their assumption.

a note on the through-line

i also came back to 313 as a guest speaker to talk about the academic success coaching research — continuous re-design of a real service, taught from the inside. showing students research that had consequences for the institution they’re sitting in tends to land better than a case study about a company they’ll never work for.