HCI & Interaction Design | Konstantinos Roumpas

The same user-centred thinking I bring to research — what does the user need to see, and when? — I bring to real interfaces. As a Technical Manager on EU Horizon projects, I design the dashboards and interactions that turn dense, multi-source project data into something people can read and act on.

The interface work also runs through my research on AI-assisted platforms for educators, where designing the tool’s interaction model was as much of the challenge as the underlying system (Roumpas & Xenos, 2024; Roumpas & Xenos, 2025). Across both, the work spans information architecture, data visualization, and interaction design — deciding what to surface, how to structure it, and how to keep it legible under real-world data. Designed in Figma.

What’s here: dashboard design, data visualization, interaction design, Figma, user-centred design for EU R&D.

SCUDO — Lagoon Operations Dashboard

When an acqua alta event hits Venice, an operator has to reason about tide forecasts, closed pontili, suspended waterbus routes, and stalled waste collection all at once. The design problem was triage: how do you let one person read a fast-moving, multi-source situation in seconds and know what to do next? I led with a single “Situation Overview” that pins the active disruption and its severity to the top, then lays out operational summary, network status, live alerts, a 12-hour tide/wind/demand forecast, and impact KPIs in a scannable grid — with prioritised recommended actions so the interface doesn’t just report, it prompts a decision.

SCUDO situation-overview dashboard for the Venice lagoon transport and waste-collection network: disruption banner, forecast, impact KPIs, and ranked response options in one view.

Search-and-Rescue Flight Map

A helicopter mission interface has to stay legible when the pilot has almost no attention to spare. The challenge here was reducing a dense 3D flight situation to what matters in the moment: a satellite map with hazard and coverage zones marked in high-contrast red, the route to target drawn as a single bold green line, and a vertical altitude tape that reads at a glance. Persistent telemetry (TAS, GS, heading, ALT, UTC, coordinates) sits along the top, and the controls are pushed to edge rails — Camera, Data, Charts on the left; Radio, System, Mission on the right — so the map itself never gets crowded.

Search-and-rescue flight interface: high-contrast hazard zones, a single clear route-to-target, an at-a-glance altitude tape, and always-on telemetry with edge-docked controls.

Live Lecture & Whiteboard Platform

This interface comes out of my research on AI-assisted platforms for educators. An online lecture asks a learner to split attention across the instructor, the material, the whiteboard, and their peers — so the interaction model, not just the feature set, was the real design work. I gave the whiteboard the centre stage and kept everything supporting it in a calm left column: today’s subject, the instructor’s video, a collapsible Material menu, and a live chat that surfaces exactly the moments teaching needs to catch (“Can you repeat that?”, “Is this going to be on the test?”). Participant tiles and a Whiteboard Mode toggle sit on the right, so the layout flexes between “watch the teacher” and “focus on the work.”

Live lecture platform: whiteboard-centred layout with a supporting rail for subject, instructor, material, and a chat that surfaces real learner questions in the moment.

Course Crafter — AI Course Authoring

Course Crafter is a tool for building courses from your own material with an AI assistant (Roumpas & Xenos, 2024; Roumpas & Xenos, 2025). The design goal was to make an AI-driven workflow feel unintimidating: a drag-and-drop canvas as the obvious starting point, a prompt bar as the single conversational entry point, and a short, jargon-free action rail (My Files, Save, Start Over, Help, Exit) so nothing about “authoring with AI” feels like a wall of settings. The retro pixel treatment is a deliberate move to make an unfamiliar workflow read as approachable and low-stakes rather than technical.

Course Crafter: a drag-and-drop canvas and single prompt bar for AI-assisted course building, with a deliberately playful pixel aesthetic to lower the barrier to entry.

Tiny Terrain — Brand & Marketing Site

Beyond operational tooling, this is a full marketing site for an education studio that teaches occupational and campus safety through Minecraft-based gamification. Here the design problem was voice: land a distinct pixel-art brand while keeping a content-heavy page — hero, three service areas, portfolio imagery, and contact — clearly structured and readable. The angled section breaks and consistent card framing carry the visitor down the page without the styling ever getting in the way of the copy.

Tiny Terrain: a pixel-art brand and marketing site for gamified safety education, balancing a strong visual identity against a readable, content-heavy layout.

This paper explores the involvement of artificial intelligence in the context of educational technology. Specifically, it presents findings from a study evaluating CourseCrafter, an AI-enhanced prototype designed to assist to the creation of Minecraft Education courses by educators, regardless of their coding expertise or familiarity with Minecraft’s controls. The study aimed to gather insights on user experiences, interface usability, and the effectiveness of AI integration within the tool. Ten educators, all of whom had some experience with Minecraft Education prior to the experiment, from different geographical areas, teaching grade and subject areas tested the prototype, completed a System Usability Scale (SUS) questionnaire, and attended a semi-structured interview. To ensure a controlled environment throughout the prototype testing, user personas were randomly handed out to participants, they were instructed to follow a detailed scenario, and alternative options would be explained with the Wizard of Oz method. The participants unanimously found the idea useful, agreed on the functionality of certain features, but shared varied concerns about the use of AI in education and the complexity of the platform. Additionally, feedback highlighted the importance of intuitive design, adequate instructional resources, and the potential impact of the tool on teaching and student engagement. These findings emphasize both the need for refinements to enhance user experience and maximize educational effectiveness but also the demand of such a tool in the industry.

The potential of Education Technology has reached a point where teachers cannot keep up with the latest trends, nor they can spend the time to get accustomed to innovative technologies that might become obsolete in a few years. With the rise in the popularity of Minecraft Education, an educational platform based on the engine of the world-famous video-game: Minecraft, as well as the benefits of gamification in classrooms for all student ages, it seems that an application that would help teachers create educational video games that are run on Minecraft Education, without any code and with artificial intelligence assistance, could be just the thing that they need to update their teaching techniques. We propose the creation of a platform like that, and we present its potential design, after being consulted by the available research that has been done to this day regarding instructional design, user interface and applications that utilize large language models.

SCUDO — Lagoon Operations Dashboard

Search-and-Rescue Flight Map

Live Lecture & Whiteboard Platform

Course Crafter — AI Course Authoring

Tiny Terrain — Brand & Marketing Site

References

2025

2024