Abstract:

This paper aims to reveal the outcomes of two separate mobile application design and development courses at Haaga-Helia University of Applied Sciences. These courses have applied dissimilar pedagogical approaches that aim to design and develop innovative mobile application for their target users. The main goal of these courses was to teach students to conduct user studies and collect users’ requirements and design application concept accordingly. ICT professionals nowadays are expected to communicate and work in multidisciplinary teams to reach overall business goals. As a result, UCD (User Centered Design) methodology has become part of courses curriculum at the university. This teaching approach provides practical experiences for students and prepare them for real life projects. This study pursuit to learn the best practices to improve the teaching of user centered design through mobile application development projects.

Our main aim was to assess the pedagogical approaches in respect of students’ motivations and innovations to come up with unique innovative mobile application for given project topic. In one course implementation we have applied general UCD (ISO 9241) methodology. This course was a joint implementation between ICT and tourism degree program students. In the second course implementation we have applied UCD framework for m-learning application development (J.Computer in-press, 2014) methodology. The difference between these courses is that in general UCD course students were not oblige systematically to go through all the stages of the UCD methodology e.g. they have conducted user studies and came up with innovative applications’ high-fidelity prototype. Additionally, in general UCD course students were mainly use the domain experts and classmate as potential target users of the applications. But in UCD framework implementation, students have gone through the framework phases iteratively by conducting user studies with potential users of the application, analysis the collected data, design the concept accordingly as scenario and finally develop high-fidelity prototype usability evaluation at usability lab. Moreover, students in UCD framework were asked to report their experience at each phases and also share with other classmate. The participants were almost homogeneous in both courses, in general UCD course participant were consists of first semester ICT students (n=21) and tourism students (n=9) who represented domain experts. In UCD framework the course participants (n=40) were mainly first semester ICT students and other degree programs’ candidates from Open University. In both courses students were given a project topic and worked as a team of 3-5 students. These courses have resulted seven innovative mobile applications with diverse usability and user experience findings.

The measurement criteria on the success of these courses were student survey, number of students dropped from the courses, concept reports, the proposed concept high-fidelity prototype usability assessments and post-interview. This paper explores important findings of our implementation experiences from teachers and students perspective. These findings help the instructors and students to implement a project based course to develop a robust innovative mobile application.

Keywords:

User Centered Design, Innovative application development, mobile application, project based course.