User Experience specialism modules
Virtual Reality
The Virtual Reality (VR) module combines the theory and psychology of VR with practical development skills. You’ll learn the skills needed to design compelling VR environments and the skills that apply to creative practice, science and industry. This module gives you the skills needed to develop VR, including understanding the basic theory of presence in VR, which underlies the basic design principles. Using a 3D engine to create interactive virtual environments, you’ll also learn practical development skills, including creating 3D environments, designing and implementing 3D interaction for VR and building social VR experiences with interactive virtual characters.
Advanced Web Development
Advanced Web Development teaches you how to build dynamic, data-driven websites using databases, front-end frameworks and server-side programming. You’ll develop the skills needed for full stack web development work and develop a web developer skillset, enabling you to build and deploy complete, data-driven websites. You’ll consider different technologies for clientside web development such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript and templates. You’ll explore methods for developing server-side web applications, by building web-accessible wrappers around databases, consider scalability issues and learn about web app configuration and deployment.
Physical Computing and the Internet of Things
Studying this module will introduce the technology involved in the development and programming of hardware devices that can sense and act in the environment. It explains and demonstrates how the environment, which is inherently continuous, can be monitored by analogue electrical and mechanical sensors, then captured and analysed using a computer, which is a discrete system. A focus of this module is the interface between the digital and the analogue. You’ll learn basic physics, electronics, programming and software engineering. The module’s practical objective is the development of the skills needed for designing and building interactive physical devices.
Mobile Development
The Mobile Development module aims to give you the fundamental understanding and skills needed to develop mobile applications. By studying this module, you will learn the principles of effective mobile user interface design and how to design and build user interfaces. You’ll learn about datadriven mobile apps, and how you can integrate an app with a data source. You’ll learn about the mobile development ecosystem and how to develop, run and test your applications. You’ll work with various sensors available on mobile devices using built-in application programming interfaces. The style of the module is practical, focusing on developing working apps.
Interaction Design
In this module, you’ll examine the notion of ‘interaction with technology’. You will focus on the concepts behind modern UX design and production and gain a solid grasp and practical experience of the process which allows the creation of interactive systems. This process involves specification, design, prototyping and evaluation. You’ll examine several design approaches and techniques and consider how they enable usability engineering. You’ll learn how to evaluate interactive systems against criteria such as efficiency and usability. You’ll examine accessibility issues from the perspective of different populations.