The First Post is About Bars

One of the universal questions you'll hear from strangers at a bar is, of course, "What do you do?" And if you reply, "I'm a student," you might as well be ready to field the follow-up. "Oh, what are you studying?"

So if you, like me, are a graduate student in Human-Computer Interaction, and you actually choose to tell the person that, you will likely need to act fast to stop their eyebrows from rising right off their head. If you're not talking to a technology person (and computer nerds don't even hang out at bars, right?), HCI apparently sounds like you're serving the evil robot masters in their quest to rule the world. So, you knowingly smile and launch into your explanation:

1. Try Wikipedia's definition of HCI: "the study of interaction between people and computers." Didn't you ever learn not to use the word in its own definition?

2. Describe a job title in the HCI field, like interaction design: "Interaction design defines the behavior of a system in response to its users over time." It's starting to look like broad descriptions of our field are not a quick way into that cute stranger's pants.

3. Make a generalization: "We figure out how to make things easier for people to use." This one is a lot simpler, but in my experience, people start thinking "How the hell are you getting a master's degree in that?" I had one person say to me "So... you're getting a master's in... troubleshooting?"

I find this interesting because I think it really highlights the non-designer's paradigm of technology: if a system is difficult to use it must be their fault. So an advanced degree in making things easier is a mile away from most folks' context. Much less the concept of conducting extensive user research, using findings from cognitive science to design iterative prototypes, and following up with rounds of usability testing.

(warning, actual content: I think it's important for us to keep this paradigm in mind when conducting any user-centered activities - design, research, testing, whatever. We as designers don't (shouldn't) share this viewpoint, and as always, this makes it harder for us to step out of our own context and into the users'.)

4. Focus on a specific HCI activity: "Well, I do a lot of user research during the design phase of things." Excellent, now the person thinks you're a marketing kid. Unless they're actually in marketing themselves, in which case they probably think you're a weird marketing kid because you called it 'user' research.

5. Try what I tend to say nowadays: "Yeah, I'm studying psychology."