HCI — Short Monsoon Course @ IIT Bombay

5 min readJun 15, 2024

Well, just to give you some background about me, I am a self taught designer graduated in BCA from Goa University. I have over 12+ years of experience in user experience design. It was always my dream to go to a design college and take proper design degree but unfortunately I did not get chance to do so. Recently, I heard about a short course thing happening at IIT Bombay and here was my chance to attend a college (even if it is for a short period of time 🤭)

I would like to share some details and my experiences about the HCI course in this article.

Stays at Mumbai or inside IIT campus

Initially, we were suggested guest house and hostel options from the faculty. However, I needed a private accommodation as my family had also accompanied me. Yes, this is one plus point of this course. Your family can also accompany you, if you have any personal constraints regarding your parents or spouse, kids etc. I was not aware of the guest house or hostel’s costs, I assumed it to be very low so I confirmed my booking at ‘guest house for private accommodation’. Initial booking is just verbally confirmed through mail. They did not take any charges of stay.

I reached Mumbai IIT Bombay campus one day earlier. I checked into the Padmavihar Guest House. The first thing I asked was the charges. They told me it is 4k per night(+taxes and food). 😲 The guest house amenities were not that great. (at least not for family and not worth 4k price)

As per course duration and schedule, I needed stay for almost 17 days. I was really dumbstruck. It was a last moment shock to me and I decided to search some other place and leave the next day soon before class starts. It was really tough for me to find a reasonable hotel too because Powai is a one of the very costly areas of Mumbai. I finally took an airbnb in powai which had more reasonable price with good amenities for family. Singles will also find rooms on airbnb with less price.

Hostel prices are also bit on higher side ranging around 1500–2500 in shared occupancy. You should choose wisely between these options as per your needs.

College/Campus/Location

The course was held in ‘Rahul Bajaj Technology Innovation Centre’ building. The guest house and hostels are at around 500m to 1km distance from college.

Transport

You can walk to the college if you take college’s guest house or hostel. Ola and uber works everywhere. You can also car pool if you stay far away from college. Transport is not a big issue but traffic is. Class timings are 9am to 4pm.

Food

Morning tea with biscuits, Afternoon lunch, Evening tea with snack is provided by the college. Zomato and Swiggy also works inside college premises.

Course Structure/Fees/Duration

This course happens only once a year in June -July month. Course duration was around 16 days including weekends. The fees are different for experienced, students and NRIs.

For experienced professionals it is 1.52L.
For students it is around 70k-90k

The structure of course of a mixture of lectures by Sir Aniruddha Joshi, hands on activities, group projects and individual assignments. All this gets completed within the course duration. Also, some extra lectures are organised from the past/current IIT faculty or graduated students.

Passing marks is 50% to get a certificate from IIT for successful completion of the course. We are given some 4–5 projects from which each one has to choose one project. Later on one group is made for one project. 5–6 people are taken in each group and we have to run our project within the group and work as a team for these 16 days.

Pros of HCI course

Rich content “no doubt”!
Learned a lot, though some processes seem old.
Sir AJ taught us new ways to work on these processes.
Studying in IIT Bombay of course has a different feeling and vibe.
Many live examples are learned from past UX techs.
Live user interviews/user studies/research.

Cons of HCI course

There is a big gap between fresher’s minds and experienced people’s minds. Bridging this gap is a bit tough.
Students have less flexibility to adapt, open for ideas/feedback.
Challenges with developers turning into designers having less knowledge of concepts in design.
Team work and collaboration needs to be strong within your group because this is the team which stays with you till the end of the course.
Course structure passing has weightage of 50–50 in both individual and group assignments. It is challenging because if your group lacks collaboration and team work, one can suffer the consequences and learn nothing in this course.
Group assignments take lot of time because it is team work and getting each one’s time to work on remotely or inside college campus is very difficult.
Sleepless nights due to assignments.

My suggestions for “Faculty”

Course structure needs to have more weightage on individual assessment so like 70% — 30% (70% is for individual assessment).
Some 1:1 activities to judge student individually. Everybody should get chance to speak or share ideas.
It is a very costly course and should not be wasted because of lack of team work and collaboration.

My suggestions for “Students”

Be open to ideas from anyone. Do not reject.
Accept feedback positively. There is no senior and junior here.
Understand team’s expertise and assign work accordingly to increase productivity.
Do not work in silos.
Do not follow bookish template for your group or individual assignments. Be creative and innovative.
Spend less time but smart time on data you gather from user interviews.
Understand patterns in affinity not just content.
Enter user interview notes directly in Miro/Figjam. Excels are bit tough to manage later.
Carry your device for the course (laptop, ipad or any smartphone)

Learn…

“Anybody cannot design”. It really needs the creative mind or a knack to understand the needs of the users and business. Also understanding how it all fits into an interface of all types. ✅
Check lot of products and apps for competitive analysis according to the project you are assigned. 📚
Take ideas from all in the team. (right or wrong doesn’t matter) 🛗
Myth — Thinking that if you have a design degree you are expert designer. ❌
Design is more than the degree and knowledge college provides. You have to learn a lot on your own and learn to understand what is right and wrong, what works in market, what does not, what works for users and what does not. 💡

Thanks for reading!

Hope this will help you for your next HCI course. 😊