Table of Contents
Study Materials
Readings
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There is no required book for this course. However, each lecture session has a set of assigned readings, mostly from research papers accessible on the Web, as shown in the table below.
Norman, D. A. The Design of Everyday Things. New York, NY: Doubleday, 1990. ISBN: 0385267746.
This little book is a classic work on usability, not just of computer interfaces but also of physical objects like doors, showers, and stoves. Full of great anecdotes, plus theory about how users form models in their heads and how users make errors. Belongs on every engineer's shelf.
Nielsen, J. Usability Engineering. Burlington, MA: Academic Press, 1994. ISBN: 0125184069.
Somewhat dated but still useful handbook for discount usability engineering, covering many of the evaluation techniques we'll be learning in this class.
Mullet, K., and D. Sano. Designing Visual Interfaces: Communication oriented techniques. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1994. ISBN: 0133033899.
A terrific guide to graphic design, chock full of examples, essential principles, and practical guidelines. Many programmers have a fear of graphic design. This book won't teach you everything -- it still pays to hire a designer! -- but it helps get over that fear and do a competent job of it yourself.
Baecker, R. M., et al. Readings in Human-Computer Interaction: Toward the Year 2000. San Francisco, CA: Morgan Kaufmann, 1995. ISBN: 1558602461.
Shneiderman, B. Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction. 4th ed. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 2004. ISBN: 0321197860.
Dix, A., et al. Human-Computer Interaction. 2nd ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1998. ISBN: 0132398648.
Olsen, D. R. Developing User Interfaces. San Francisco, CA: Morgan Kaufmann, 1998. ISBN: 1558604189.
Tufte, E. R. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press, 1983. ISBN: 0318029928.
Raskin, J. The Humane Interface: New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems. New York, NY: ACM Press, 2000. ISBN: 0201379376.
Johnson, J. GUI Bloopers: Don'ts and Do's for Software Developers and Web Designers. San Francisco, CA: Morgan Kaufman, 2000. ISBN: 1558605827.
Card, S. K., T. Moran, and A. Newell. The Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1983. ISBN: 0898598591.
Gonick, L. Cartoon Guide to Statistics. New York, NY: Harper, 1994. ISBN: 0062731025.
Box, G. E. P., W. G. Hunter, and S. J. Hunter. Statistics for Experimenters: An Introduction to Design, Data Analysis, and Model Building. New York, NY: Wiley, 1978. ISBN: 0471093157.
Miller, R. G. Beyond Anova: Basics of Applied Statistics. New York, NY: Wiley, 1986. ISBN: 0471819220.
| WEEK # | TOPICS | READINGS |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | L1: Usability | |
| 2 | L2: User-Centered Design L3: UI Software Architecture | L2 Gould, John, et al. "The 1984 Olympic Message System: a test of behavioral principles of system design." CACM 30, no. 9 (1987). L3 Krasner, Glenn E. and Stephen T. Pope. "A Description of the Model-View-Controller User Interface Paradigm in the Smalltalk-80 System." JOOP 1, no. 3 (1988). (PDF) |
| 3 | L4: Human Capabilities L5: Output Models | L4 Blanch, Renaud, Yves Guiard, and Michel Beaudouin-Lafon. "Semantic pointing: improving target acquisition with control-display ratio adaptation." CHI, 2004. Optional: Card, Stuart, Thomas Moran, and Allen Newell. "The Human Information Processor." Chapter 2 in The Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction. 1983. L5 Calder, Paul R. and Mark A. Linton. "Glyphs: Flyweight Objects for User Interfaces." UIST, 1990. Edwards, Keith, Scott Hudson, Joshua Marinacci, Roy Rodenstein, Thomas Rodriguez, and Ian Smith. "Systematic output modification in a 2D user interface toolkit." UIST, 1997. |
| 4 | L6: Conceptual Models and Metaphors L7: Input Models | L6 Optional: Norman, Donald. The Design of Everyday Things. L7 Myers, Brad. "A new model for handling input." ACM TOIS 8, no. 3 (July 1990). |
| 5 | L8: Design Principles L9: Paper Prototyping | L8 Tognazzini, Bruce. First Principles of Interaction Design. Nielsen, Jakob. Ten Usability Heuristics. Grudin, Jonathan. "The Case Against User Interface Consistency." CACM 32, no. 10 (October 1989). Optional: Nielsen, Jakob. Usability Engineering. Chapter 5. L9 Rettig, Marc. "Prototyping for Tiny Fingers." CACM 37, no. 4 (April 1994). |
| 6 | L10: Constraints and Layout | L10 Hill, Ralph. "The Rendezvous constraint maintenance system." UIST, 1993. Hudson, Scott, and Ian Smith. "Ultra-lightweight constraints." UIST, 1996. |
| 7 | L11: Graphic Design L12: Computer Prototyping | L11 Optional: Mullet, Kevin, and Darrell Sano. Designing Visual Interfaces. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1995. ISBN: 0133033899. L12 Cooper, Alan. The Perils of Prototyping. 1994. |
| 8 | Quiz 1 | |
| 9 | L13: Toolkits L14: Heuristic Evaluation | L13 Myers, Brad, Scott Hudson, and Randy Pausch. "Past, present, and future of user interface software tools." ACM TOCHI 7, no. 1 (March 2000). L14 Nielsen, Jakob. Heuristic Evaluation. Read the first four pages: (a) How to conduct a heuristic evaluation (b) A list of ten recommended heuristics for usable interface design (c) A more detailed discussion of the characteristics of the usability problems found by heuristic evaluation (d) How to rate the severity of the usability problems Dumas, Joseph, Rolf Molich, and Robin Jeffries. "Describing usability problems: are we sending the right message?" Interactions 11, no. 4 (July/August 2004). |
| 10 | L15: User Testing L16: Experiment Design | L15 Gomoll, Kathleen, and Anne Nicol. "Guidelines for user observation." User Observation: Guidelines for Apple Developers (January 1990). L16 Zelkowitz, Marvin, and Dolores Wallace. "Experimental methods for validating technology." IEEE Computer 31, no. 5 (May 1998). Optional: McGrath, Joseph E. "Methodology matters: doing research in the behavioral and social sciences." In Readings in Human-Computer Interaction: Toward the Year 2000. Edited by R. M. Baecker, J. Grudin, and W. A. S. Buxton. |
| 11 | L17: Experiment Analysis L18: Research Topics: Predictive Evaluation | L17 None L18 John, Bonnie, and David Kieras. "The GOMS family of user interface analysis techniques: comparison and contrast." ACM TOCHI 3, no. 4 (December 1996). |
| 12 | Quiz 2 L19: Research Topics: Information Visualization | L19 Ahlberg, Christopher, and Ben Shneiderman. "Visual information seeking: tight coupling of dynamic query filters with starfield displays." CHI, 1994. Rao, Ramana and Stuart Card. "The table lens: merging graphical and symbolic representations in an interactive focus + context visualization for tabular information." CHI, 1994. |
| 13 | L20: Research Topics: Pen-based UI L21: Research Topics: Weird Modalities | L20 Apitz, Georg, and Francois Guimbretiere. "CrossY: a crossing-based drawing application." UIST, 2004. Wobbrock, Jacob, Brad Myers, and John Kembel. "EdgeWrite: a stylus-based text entry method designed for high accuracy and stability of motion." UIST, 2003. L21 Schwesig, Carsten, Ivan Poupyrev, and Eijiro Mori. "Gummi: a bendable computer." CHI, 2004. Dennerlein, Jack, David Martin, and Christopher Hasser. "Force-feedback improves performance for steering and combined steering-targeting tasks." CHI, 2000. |
| 14 | L22: Research Topics: Zooming and Transparent UI Demonstration Day | L22 Bier, Eric, Maureen Stone, Ken Pier, William Buxton, and Tony DeRose. "Toolglass and Magic Lenses: The See-Through Interface." SIGGRAPH, 1993. Bederson, Benjamin, and Jon Meyer, and Lance Good. "Jazz: An Extensible Zoomable User Interface Graphics Toolkit in Java." UIST, 2000. |