The Human-Centered Design and Development (HCDD) major is interdisciplinary, combining foundational coursework in mathematics, statistics, information technology, and application development with specialized courses in social and psychological aspects of information and technology use, usability engineering, user research methods, and user interface design.
The HCDD major brings together three related knowledge domains: application development, user experience design, and usability evaluation. The major will provide students with foundation courses in application development, databases, networking and human-centered design and development during the first two years. In the later two years, the focus shifts to the study of technology usability and effectiveness. The capstone course will require the students to apply their skills in analysis, application design and development, user experience design and usability evaluation, to a real-world project in a specific context of use.
In addition, students will select an Application Focus area of study to explore domains such as Psychology, Sociology, Healthcare, Digital Arts and Communication, or Security and Risk Analysis, providing an interdisciplinary education to complement the major. Students will complete 12.0 credits of study from one Application Focus area with at least one course being at the 400-level. The expectation is that students will progress from introductory courses to more advanced topics within the Application Focus area.
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