Tallinn University

Master in Human-Computer Interaction

Who Are We Looking for?

The Human-Computer Interaction programme welcomes applicants who want to understand how people engage with technology and who aim to design human-centred and sustainable interactive systems that support better, more meaningful digital experiences.

• Developers who want to design better products: applicants with technical experience who want to understand human behaviour and build more meaningful interactions.
• Designers who want deeper insight into users: applicants with a visual, product, or interaction design background who want to base their decisions on cognition, research, and evidence.
• Psychologists and social scientists interested in technology: applicants fascinated by how thinking, motivation, and emotion shape digital behaviour.
• Applicants from other fields entering UX or HCI: career changers looking for a structured, research-based path into human-centred and sustainable interaction design.

Course Outline

The Human-Computer Interaction programme is an internationally accredited two year Master's programme (120 ECTS), fully in English, offered by the Tallinn University’s School of Digital Technologies.

The aim of the HCI programme is to prepare specialists, equipped with knowledge and skills for designing meaningful technology. You will undertake interdisciplinary courses, projects and research from the disciplines of design, technology, and cognitive psychology. The programme is organized in layers, from a very solid core to flexible electives allowing you to fine-tune your education.

Our lectures and seminars take place during the working days, starting at 16:00, some courses will start at 14:00. The exact schedule is announced some weeks before the semester will start. Occasionally some courses are organized in shorter, more intensive study cycles, or delivered via the Internet, as web-based courses. Also our labs are open daily.

Research topics

Within the field of Human-Computer Interaction, the HCI group focuses on advancing knowledge about how people perceive and interact with information technologies and how to further develop these technologies to support and augment their individual and collective physical, perceptual and cognitive abilities.

User Experience

User experience is an emerging research area with a range of issues to be resolved. Among them, the measurability of the user experience remains controversial. Critical arguments hinge on the meaningfulness, validity, and usefulness of reducing fuzzy experiential qualities such as fun, challenge, and trust to numbers; going beyond using user’s perceptions, actions, and reactions as raw data, to using neurophysiological responses as data for measuring user experience. Ongoing work focuses on trust and on hedonic aspects of user experience.

Possible topics in this area are:

1. Theory and scale development.
2. The study of neurophysiological correlates of user experience.

Physiological Computing

This area combines computer science, neuroscience, engineering, and design for biohacking, here understood as measuring various biomarkers and behaviors for artistic expression or to optimize health and wellbeing. This relies heavily on personalization techniques, which in general, build upon user models and interaction adaptation techniques. Our focus is on modeling and implementing personalization techniques using neurophysiological computing. These models are application-specific and account both for long-term user properties, which are stable over longer time periods (e.g. personal preferences, attitudes, personality traits, prevailing moods), and short-term user properties, which can change more rapidly (e.g. momentary affective/cognitive states, feelings).

Possible topics in this area are:

1. The development of physiological user models for personalized systems.
2. Design, development, and validation of novel applications of physiological computing for the arts, health, or wellbeing.

Body-Centric Computing

Computing is moving closer to our bodies, as reflected by the growing amount of research and commercial products. However, both the research agenda, vocabulary, and technology for discussing, designing, and developing for the body still need to be shaped. Currently lacking are means of reasoning about how body-centric interfaces are assigned roles and meaning; models for predicting user intent when interacting with body-centric computing ecologies; and infrastructure for enabling seamless body-centric computing and dynamic substitution of inherent body-centric interfaces.

Possible topics in this area are:

1. Theories and models enabling reasoning about body-centric interactions.
2. Development of adaptive technical infrastructure for supporting dynamic reconfigurations of body-centric computing interfaces.

Design Theory and Methodology

Over the past three decades, we have witnessed shifts, connections, and re-framings in just about every area of interaction design: how it is done, who is doing it, for what goals, and what its results are. These changes show shifts from designing things to designing interactions, first on a micro-level and lately also on a macro level; and from designing for people to designing with people and very recently, to designing by people. We focus on empowerment and on enabling a new wave of digital literacy as possessing the knowledge, skills, and attitude to use our digital environment is no longer enough, we need to be able to shape it.

Possible topics in this area are:

1. Exploratory research studies develop new knowledge about how we facilitate the design of digital artifacts.
2. New understanding of designing interactions with digital artifacts enabled by existing theories, paradigms, and methods.
3. Design and development research studies create new design methods that are meant to improve in a specific way some activity in the way we design digital products and services.
4. Contexts of and quality in use assessments of digital systems.
5. The interplay between emerging digital technologies and HCI concepts, theories, and methods.

HCI graduates build careers in roles where design, research and human behaviour intersect. The programme prepares the students for professional positions across the user experience and interaction design fields, as well as for research-oriented paths.

Graduates typically work as UX or Interaction Designers, UX, User or Design Researchers. Many of our alumni continue to do doctoral studies in HCI or related areas. They find opportunities in design agencies, software companies, start-ups, and research groups both in Estonia and abroad.