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

Raskin, J. The Humane Interface. Addison Wesley, 2000. ISBN: 0201379376.

Shneiderman, B. and C. Plaisant. Designing the User Interface, Fourth Edition. Addison Wesley, 2005. ISBN: 0321197860.

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

Student membership in the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) with the Student Portal package ($42) -- or you can choose the Student Portal and Print Package ($62) if you really love recycling chores and want to pay extra for the privilege. Joining the ACM will give you all access to the Association's extensive digital library (virtually all ACM publications for the past decade or so) and also bibliographies of other relevant research literature. I will be assigning some readings from this library. Visit the Web site to register: http://www.acm.org/membership/student/

Plus handouts and on-line assignments TBA

Assignments and Grading Scheme

There are three major and two smaller assignment for this course. Two of the major assignments are individual work and these account for 55% of your course grade. The other three assignments are group work and account for 45% of your grade.