Winter 1999, TuTh 3:00-4:30
College of Computing 102

Instructor

John Stasko, stasko@cc.gatech.edu

253 College of Computing, 894-5617

Office Hours: Mon 1-2, Thu 2-3, or by appt.

 

Teaching Assistant

Colleen Kehoe, colleen@cc.gatech.edu

Student Services bench area, 894-6266

Office Hours: Tue 10-11, Wed 3-4, or by appt.

All CoC courses

General Information

• To facilitate communication between human factors engineers and soon-to-be computer scientists on user interface development projects.
• To provide the future user interface designer with concepts and strategies for making design decisions.
• To expose the future user interface designer to tools, techniques, and ideas for interface design.
• To introduce the student to the literature of human-computer interaction.
• To stress the importance of good user interface design.

An approximate syllabus for the course appears below. A few changes are always possible.

Week  Reading               Topics
1     1                    Introduction to field.  History of HCI.
2     2                    Human capabilities.  User modelling. Task
                              analysis.
3     3, 4.1-4.2           Interpretive and predictive evaluation.  
                              Prototyping.
4     2.5-2.11, 11.3-11.7  Design.  Graphic design.
5     6, 7, 8, 9.4         Dialog design: WIMP, command langs, direct
                              manipulation, speech.
6     4.3-4.9              Project poster session. Evaluation with users.  
7     5                    Usability testing and experiments. UI software.
8     11.1-11.2            Software agents.  Handling errors.
9     12, 15               Documentation and help. Information search
                              and visualization.
10    9, 14                New UI modalities.  Ubiquitous computing. 
                              CSCW.

The readings listed above are chapters from our textbook, Designing the User Interface, 3rd edition, by Ben Shneiderman, Addison Wesley, 1998. As you can see, we will be skipping around in terms of reading assignments, so keep up and listen in class for any changes or modifications. Also, a number of supplementary readings will be passed out in class. There is no excuse for ignorance of the assigned reading material.

The actual material covered in class is presented below. Assignments are noted when they were handed out. Readings are in italics at the bottom of each entry.