Stimulating Entrepreneurship in Teaching Human Computer Interaction
This paper tackles the problem of student disengagement with theoretical HCI topics for educators and students in software development.
The paper addresses the challenge of making Human Computer Interaction (HCI) concepts more engaging for students by integrating an entrepreneurial framework. It introduces the Product Market Fit canvas into the HCI course to connect theoretical user understanding with practical application, aiming to make the 'solution domain' more attractive to students.
Software development requires understanding of users, user needs, user tasks and context in which they are operating. These skills are familiar to entrepreneurs, product managers, and marketing experts. However, our teaching experience suggests that students generally find these topics less attractive as they perceive them to be far too theoretical and thus, not as useful. During the years of teaching the Human Computer Interaction course we have noticed students' preferences for learning technology oriented methods, or what we refer to topics belonging to solution domain. The changes in the modernized HCI course introduced Product Market Fit canvas in order to bridge the gap between 'theoretical' and 'practical' part of the course.