Importance Of Human-Computer Interaction

I have always wondered how technology can be beneficial to mass people. At the beginning, I did not have much idea about how a system can be designed which will affect the behavior and perception of people in a constructive way. But my innermost feeling always ticked me to know further about this. The thought of inventing something that can help thousands of people always fascinated me. Later I came to know that this concealed thought of mine, has actually a name, which is Human-Computer Interaction. Though I did not have the formal knowledge about this field until I attended the HCI course in my undergraduate program, now when I think about it, I find that I was always subconsciously intrigued by this, throughout my undergraduate life.
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I took that course with great interest and found that it has every element that would make me want to work dedicatedly in that field. In this course, I worked on an HCI project, where we created interactive and educative games in Bengali to make learning easy and fun for the children with autism in my country. In this project, I worked with a team of 9 people and I worked mostly on user interface design. We noticed that there is no effective app for these special children of our country in our native language and the remaining apps have a lot of distractions, like loud music and different bright colors, which makes it hard for them to concentrate. So, we visited some schools to observe the children and talked to the teachers, guardians and some experts to find out what would benefit them. After going through the steps of brainstorming, need finding and storyboarding, we determined the specific problem and found a creative solution. After prototyping and evaluating the prototypes we finally built our intervention to help the children with special needs. We used Kinect sensor in our intervention to make their learning experience more interesting. The satisfaction I felt after being able to do something like that made me realize that, this is the research area I should be working on. Here I will design for people and this thought, that the result of my hard work will bring a positive impact on someone’s life, motivates me. This way, not only I can develop a research work which solidifies my contribution in a paper, but also I can actually see how my work affects people positively which gives me gratification. HCI actually helps to bind people and technology together and this combination along with my satisfaction makes it ideal for me to choose HCI as research