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SIMS 213
User Interface Design and
Development
Instructor: Marti Hearst
3 units. CCN 42709
Spring 1999
TTh 11:00 - 12:30, 202 South Hall
Introduction
This course will cover the design, prototyping, and
evalution of user interfaces to computers, which is often
called Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). It is loosely based
on courses CS1 and MIS1 described in the ACM SIGCHI
Curricula for Human-Computer Interaction (Association for
Computing Machinery, 1992, 1998).
HCI covers many topics including:
- Human capabilities (e.g., visual and auditory perception, memory,
mental models, and interface metaphors)
- Interface techniology (e.g., input and output devices, interaction
styles, and common interface paradigms)
- Interface design methods (e.g., user-centered design, prototyping,
and design principles and rules)
- Interface evaluation (e.g., software logging, user observation,
benchmarks and experiments).
This material will be covered through lectures, reading, discussions,
homework assignments, and a course project.
Goal of the Course
The goal of the course is for students to learn how to design,
prototype, and evaluate user interfaces using a variety of methods.
In order to achieve this, students should come away with an understanding
of:
- how to study the tasks that a prospective user will need to accomplish
with a software system
- the cognitive and perceptual constraints that affect UI design
- techniques for evaluating a user interface design
- the importance of iterative design in producing usable software
- the underlying technology used to prototype and implement user interface
code
- how to work together on a team project and to communicate the results
of work, both in oral and written form.
Course Project
In addition to covering general HCI topics, students will learn
to use interface development tools to design, prototype, and evaluate
a simple interface in a team-oriented environment. We will first prototype
our interfaces on paper. We will then use a prototyping tool, either
Visual Basic running on Windows 95/NT, or potentially a Web interface
builder tool. Students who have a preferred prototyping tools can propose
using this instead.
Prerequisites
You should have taken the SIMS core introductory courses or else CS
61A and CS61B. No other course work is assumed. Helpful related courses
include those in psychology, statistics, graphic design, and information
vizualization.
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