CSE 590H Course Outline

Spring 1995

Introduction

The challenge of this course will be to understand human behavior, language, and action against a rich background of social practice. Because there is no one best way or approach this difficult task, we will provide a variety of perspectives and views on the nature of the problem at hand. The current outline is loosely organized around a variety of themes / perspectives / foundations.

We have broken the content into the following sections. Following the unit title is the approximate number of sessions which will be spent on each unit. The course will meet on Tuesdays and Thursdays, giving us 20 1.5 hour sessions. If needed, we also have a two hour slot during finals week available (Thursday June 8, 10:30-12:20). There won't be a final or other exams in the class though.

Our plan is to present the material in approximately this order. Each topic will be described in turn, followed by a discussion of the project component of the course, and concluding with a bibliography of reading materials.

Table of Contents

Unit Descriptions
  1. Design Sensitivity
  2. HCI Tradition
  3. Tools and Skills for Design
  4. Psychological Foundations
  5. Linguistic Foundations
  6. Design Practice and Case Studies
  7. Political and Social Foundations/Perspectives
  8. Controversies and New Frontiers
Assignments and Project Description
  1. Small Assignments
  2. Design Journals
  3. Project Overview
Timeline for the Course

Details

Please keep in mind that everything in this outline is very tentative and open to suggested change. We will not be able to read all of the listed readings (clearly), but we will attempt to get to a lot of them.

1. Design Sensitivity

Introduction to design through seminal readings in everyday design [Norman88]. Also, exposure to a few introductory readings in HCI and participatory design, setting the tone for the rest of the course [Myers93]. The purpose of this unit is to get people thinking about design, why it is hard, and the different perspectives that go into making a given design.

Readings:

*[Norman88] Ch1 30 pages [Myers93] (Why is design hard?) 12 pages Exercise(s):

Find several examples each of everyday artifacts which are designed well or poorly. Pick one example of bad design, and focus on it. Attempt to describe the problem as best you can, using drawings, descriptions, scenarios. Finally, try to reason about the designer's perspective and how or why they designed this artifact the way they did.

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2. HCI Tradition

Where does HCI come from, philosphically speaking? It is important to understand this in order to evaluate the various perspectives, both traditional and non-traditional, that will be presented throughout the course. There are a few good works that discuss the nature of our tradition, and what it has meant for the development of the HCI field [WF] [Ehn].

Readings:

*[WF] Ch2 (Rationalistic tradition) 12 pages *[Ehn] Ch6+7 (Simon's science of design) 30 pages [Ehn] Ch1 (Cartesian tradition) and 17 pages [Simon] Return to Contents

3. Tools and Skills for Design

At this point, there will be an introduction to some standard skills and tools. We'll spend up two sessions studying/practicing skills. At this point, there will be a guest lecture given by Judy Ramey from STC, about task/domain/audience analysis. The skills we want to focus upon will include: The tools section (2-3 sessions) will focus on the state of the art in software tools for building user interfaces. Rather than going into a great deal of depth, we will attempt to paint a broad picture of the landscape of tools. Certain groups will certainly want to look at specific tools in more depth and possibly give optional tutorials/demonstrations to interested parties. We will survey the following topics:

A discussion of some UI programming techniques:

A brief coverage of the following libraries, toolkits, and systems: Finally, we'll discuss some other tools often used for building mockups and prototypes: The purpose of this section is to give the students some practical fundementals with which they can begin practicing design.

Exercise(s):

Brainstorming/representation/sketching tasks. Observation exercise. These exercises will serve as practice for the project component of the course.

Readings:

*[Preece] Ch18 (user-centered design) Ch22 (envisioning design) 25 pages *[Blomberg] (observation and ethnography) 22 pages *[Myers] (technical stuff) 30 pages [Irby] (design guidelines) 9 pages [Muller] (democratizing the design process) 14 pages [Tufte] (information display) ? for lecture, maybe Return to Contents

4. Psychological Foundations

This will be more or less standard HCI foundations including a discussion of mental models, schema theory, problem solving theory, memory, perception, GOMS models, learning theory. We will read [CMN], [Norman], [Preece], [John].

Readings:

*[Norman] (Direct manipulation paper) 35 pages *[CMN] (GOMs models, information processing view) ?? pages *[Preece] Chapters 4-6. (perception, memory, mental models) 65 pages Return to Contents

5. Linguistic Foundations

Understanding the role of language is clearly crucial to becoming a good designer. There are a great number of options here: metaphors, the role of narrative understanding, speech acts (Searle+Austin), and language games (Wittgenstein). We will read [Ehn], [WF]. We are looking for works on metaphors and will probably find some in [Laurel90].

Exercise:

Short paper discussion issues raised by alternative approaches to the problem of understanding human action and meaning.

Readings:

*[Ehn] Ch4 (Wittgenstein) 19 pages *[WF] Ch5 (Austin and Searle) 15 pages (need good work on metaphors here) [Lakoff and Johnson] _Metaphors We Live By_ [Preece] Ch7 (Metaphors) [Laurel90] Return to Contents

6. Design Practice and Case Studies

At this point, we would revisit a number of practical design areas, including usability testing and evaluation. Hopefully at this point in the course, we would have enough perspective to evaluate some historical design projects, such as the Xerox Star [Bewley], [Verplank], and [Smith].

Readings:

[Bewley], [Verplank], [Smith] Star Case Study 5, 11, 15 pages [Preece] Ch29-34 .. pretty decent job of evaluation, experiment, and testing 100 pages Return to Contents

7. Political and Social Foundations/Perspectives

Perhaps a Marxist perspective (ala Scandanavian design), wrapping up the participatory design theme of the course. This might be a good place to read some of the classics [Suchman].

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8. Controversies and New Frontiers

Explore a few "hot" topics: information retrieval on a massive scale, the National Information Infrastructure, how can AI help HCI, Natural language interfaces, 3D interfaces, Agent based interfaces, and Computer Supported Cooperative Work. (We are looking for good readings here, there are a few in [Laurel90], but we'd like a few more recent.)

Readings:

??? Return to Contents

Assignments and Projects

Small assignments

There will be a number of small assignments, most of which are described above. These will be carried out individually and/or in groups. The purpose of these labs will be to reinforce reading materials and develop design skills. Most of these assignments will require a short, relatively informal write-up.

Design Journal

We will ask you to maintain a design journal/log throughout the quarter, which form a basis for the "history" of the course and their personal development. These journals will be turned in at the end of the quarter and "graded."

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Project

An essential part of the course will be a class project. This will involve designing and prototyping an interface for a software system, using some of the available software tools. The system might be a part of an ongoing research project they are involved in, or might be new. Finally, the students will be asked to evaluate their prototype and perform some small scale usability studies. Students should work in groups of 2 or 4. We will also periodically ask the groups to present their current work to the class, for general discussion and suggestions.

We expect the projects will be done on a variety of platforms, using a variety of systems. Some will involve constructing working interfaces to an existing system, while others may involve constructing prototypes only in a system such as Macromind or Hypercard.

Please Note:

We do not want to over-constrain these projects. Almost anything is acceptable as long as it shows a reasonable application of techniques and skills learned during the quarter. The project should include and show evidence of extensive brainstorming, storyboarding, domain analysis, experimentation, paper mockup development before beginning any coding. After an initial prototype has been developed, we expect to see extensive user testing and analysis of these tests. The purpose of this project is not to develop a working product, but rather to experience and practice the HCI design cycle. In a sense, we would prefer that you not to invest too much of yourselves into the finished product, because we want you to be able to be critical and realistic about what you have accomplished and how it could be improved. A prototype with limited functionality which shows evidence of solid design and evaluation practices is far preferrable to a snazzy, but poorly designed project.

Deliverables:

We'd like to see a demo of your project, as well as hear a short spiel about the history of your project (how did you evaluate it? what other ideas did you have? how did your tools limit/help you? what compromises did you make? etc.). Finally, we'd like you to turn in a short paper describing the project history in a little more detail.

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Course Timeline

The following is an approximate timeline for the course. Unit Name Sessions --------- -------- 1. Design Sensitivity 1 2. HCI Tradition 1 3. Tools and Skills for Design 4-5 4. Psychological Foundations 2 5. Linguistic Foundations 2 6. Design Practice and Case Studies 3-4 7. Political and Social Foundations/Perspectives 1 8. Controversies and New Frontiers 3 Presentation Units Sessions __________________ -------- 1. "Midterm" project presentation 1* 2. "Final" project presentation 2 __________ Total: 20-22 Notes: * The midterm project presentations will not take place during class time. Return to Contents