This is best viewed as a continuation to my previous post “What Is HCI?”. I hope I’ve made it clear how diverse and multidisciplinary HCI can be as a field, but this also brings up one more thing to keep in mind. There is not really a concrete way to start exploring HCI as a field. It’s a lot more straightforward to get started with fields like computer science when one can just say “start off by learning programming”, but for HCI,it’s usually something that someone explores after building off a primary field that they can apply HCI research to like psychology, design or computer science. For example, I have met HCI researchers that have started off in computer science and also as design students to then migrate into HCI and learn the basics of other fields. It is possible, but it is a lot less concrete than other fields in my opinion. However, HCI shares a common trait with any field of study in that getting knowledgeable and familiar with it requires hard work and time. The amount of time and effort can be alleviated with the right resources. Here are some resources and tips I have found useful so far as an HCI student.
Books and online courses are the go to resource for learning almost any skill. Rather than trying to immediately read a textbook on HCI, what I would recommend is getting familiar with design thinking. Regardless of what sphere of HCI you pursue, whether more technical or design oriented, design thinking will likely be a useful and imperative part of it. I would recommend reading “The design of everyday things” by Don Norman and “Change by design” by Tim Brown. Being familiar with basic user research techniques (both qualitative and quantitative) is a very commonplace skill that you are expected to gain as an HCI researcher. There are some great online courses offered by University of Michigan, University of California San Diego and Georgia Tech on coursera. Most, if not all of these can be audited for free. There are a variety of free design resources on YouTube as well and I encourage you to explore it thoroughly.
If you are familiar with research and reading papers, this may come as no surprise, but conferences are some of the best ways to get insight into the present and future scope of a research field. HCI conferences can be a great way to really explore the breadth of the field as accepted papers can vary wildly with the fields they contribute to. You might find papers on gamifying a security protocol, or a paper that tries to streamline education tools for artificial intelligence or a paper that utilises crowdsourcing to study the psychology behind a technology adoption. Furthermore, the papers you find interesting will serve as flags for what fields within HCI you might find interesting and will further point you to other conferences. Some great and popular HCI conferences are CHI (Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems), MobileHCI and IUI (International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces).