UW Master’s in Human Centered Design & Engineering

Interested in research, design and engineering the interactions between people and technology? In this master’s program, you’ll examine real-world problems in user-experience research and design, human-computer interaction, and interface design; learn to build solutions that put people first. Visit https://www.hcde.uw.edu/ms.

Video Transcript:

[Tyler]
In HCDE Master's Program, I'd say research is core all the way through. Even if you want be a designer, you come away understanding how research is done, and understanding how research generates really important insights that produce things like design requirements, and you know, what are you, what does your design need to do at the end of the day to help the person on the other end.

[Paula]
If you don't spend time in the research phase, which really is the understanding humans phase, then you're going to make mistakes later and it gets more expensive, because I was doing this program part-time I could see that in real time working itself out.

[Francis]
The way that the program is structured is a lot of the classes are offered in the evenings, and what that allowed me to do was take on some part-time internships throughout the program. That combined with the curriculum and the academics that the program provides actually gave me an advantage when I was looking for jobs in the industry after the program.

[Tyler]
In a normal classroom we might have half of the students being full-time students, and half of the students who are working, and part-time students, and you get this great mix of skillsets. So, you get students who have recently graduated and you also get students that are designers, or who are researchers, who are doing things now.

[Francis]
I probably learned just as much from my classmates that were sitting next to me as I did from the actual classes. There was just a wide range of perspectives that, it's hard to get exposed to then unless you're really in an environment that really grows and values like those different types of perspectives.

[Paula]
This great conversation always happened. Whenever we had a group project it was people in industry, people not in industry, people with backgrounds in psychology, people with backgrounds in kinesiology. All could come to the table and give you some really interesting insight.

[Tyler]
The HCDE Master's Program does a really good job, I think, of preparing students for industry. We do that by involving industry throughout the program. So companies will come in and do design jams, companies will come in and do like an example of the Google Sprint methodology. They'll come in for our portfolio reviews, and give students feedback on their work.

Seattle is a hotbed of tech companies right now and more and more we're finding that industry knows about our program, and industry wants our students.

[Paula]
Doing the program gave me that confidence. It gave me a vocabulary that I never had. I had an appreciation for those concepts, for the process of human-centered design to make the things that I was then building or owning as a product manager, really meet users' needs.

[Francis]
If you don't have the experience or the connections or don't even know where to start and you want to take your career and education to the next level, the HCDE program provides a lot of those avenues and opens up a lot of connections, opens up a lot of knowledge and you're able to come up with the program feeling more confident and being able to apply what you've learned in the industry right away.

[Tyler]
I think what's special is that core commitment to really making future designers and researchers, and kind of seen where the world is and looking beyond it. We talk about how we build possibility. You know, I think that's what we want do with our Master’s program, is to produce people who are going to build even more possibility in the world.