The specialization in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) educates the professional who is designing and developing technologies that fit the organization and work practices, the work to be done, and the capabilities of the user.
Students learn how to create effective human-computer interaction both by determining useful system functionality, and by designing a usable interface. The "interface" is broadly construed to include not just the visual/auditory display and interaction dialog, but the situation in its entirety, the group in which this task takes place, and the organizational goals and resources. The specialization has applicability to people who are designing technologies for work, education, entertainment and social interaction, and takes as its design materials the technology and social processes (the coordination among actors, the incentive scheme, etc.).
Graduates from the HCI specialization are employed in a variety of professions: as entrepreneur software developers; as team members involved in software development in a larger organization; as inventors of the next interaction paradigm; and as the strategists interested in achieving the organization's goals with distributed talent connected by new technologies.
HCI courses also serve those who wish to become effective webmasters, evaluators of software for use in an organization, writers of software reviews in a magazine like InfoWorld, and writers of technical documentation and training programs. Some job titles of recent graduates are:
* Webmaster
* Technical writer
* Software developer
* Entrepreneur
http://www.si.umich.edu/msi/hci.htm
