Description and Objectives

This course acquaints students with professional methods for creating and evaluating useful, usable, and effective user interfaces and with strategies for designing more complex interactions and user experiences with online resources.

By the end of this course, students will have a broad understanding of interfaces and interactivity. They will have analyzed and measured the efficiency of existing interfaces, developed ideas for and prototyped alternative interfaces, researched one or more aspects of interaction for a group project, and built a prototype of that project.

Specific Learning Objectives include:

• Learning to structure applications and interfaces for specific audiences
• Learning to specify the content and/or features of an application or interactive system
• Learning to employ sound principles of User-Centered Design
• Learning to conduct appropriate research (quantitative, qualitative, literature review)

Course Requirements and Policies

Students are expected to attend every scheduled class, complete the reading assignments, and participate actively in discussion. A statement of general academic policies appears on my Web site. That statement is an extension of this document. See http://iat.ubalt.edu/kaplan/policies.htm. Please also read the University's policies in the Student Handbook.

Every student is required to create a home page (this file must be named index.htm) in his/her directory on the student server: student-iat.ubalt.edu. All completed work must be posted to that directory and must be linked from the student's home page. If it is not in the right place on the server and if no link to the work appears on the home page, the work will not be counted. In addition, every student's home page must have a link to that student's Group Blog.

Required Texts

Shneiderman, B. and C. Plaisant. Designing the User Interface, Fifth Edition. Addison Wesley, 2010. ISBN: 0321537351.

Snyder, Carolyn. Paper Prototyping. Morgan Kaufmann, 2003. ISBN: 1558608702.

Plus handouts and on-line assignments TBA

Assignments and Grading Scheme

There are two parts to this course: your individual work on a research paper (literature review) and your work as a member of a group. The research paper will account for 40% of the total grade. Group work will account for the other 60%

Most of the group grade will be awarded for specific deliverables, but 10% will be based on how well you individually perform as a group member.

Weekly Readings and Assignments

date	readings and assignments due
Sep 11	Muller, M.: Participatory Design: The Third Space in HCI [pdf] ; Shneiderman and Plaisant, Chapters 1-3; Snyder, Chapter 15; form groups
Sep 18	Shneiderman and Plaisant, Chapter 4; Snyder, Chapters 1-4; Goodwin (handout), Chapter 12 & Chapter 13
Sep 25	Raskin (handout)
Oct 02	Shneiderman and Plaisant, Chapter 5-6; Snyder, Chapters 7 & 9
Oct 09	Snyder, Chapters 5-6; Group Outline Due
Oct 16	No Class: Baltimore Marathon. Do the third item on the Online Readings page.
Oct 23	Shneiderman and Plaisant, Chapters 7-8; Snyder, Chapters 12-14
Oct 30	Paper Prototype
Nov 06	Shneiderman and Plaisant, Chapter 9; Snyder, Chapters 8 & 10-11
Nov 13	Shneiderman and Plaisant, Chapters 10-11
Nov 20	Shneiderman and Plaisant, Chapters 12-14 & Afterward
Nov 27	No Class: Thanksgiving; Research Paper due by midnight, Nov. 28
Dec 04	Technical Prototype
Dec 11	Group Presentations