Interaction and Interface Design
| Instructor: | Kathryn Summers, Associate Professor School of Information Arts and Technologies 500 Charles Royal, 410.837.6202 ksummers@ubalt.edu iat.ubalt.edu/summers |
| Office Hours: | Wednesdays 4:00 - 6:00 PM and by appointment |
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. 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.html) 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
Saffer, Dan. Designing for Interaction: Creating Smart Applications
and Clever Devices. New Riders, 2007. ISBN: 0321432061.
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). Joining the ACM will give you 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. Some readings from this library will be assigned.
Visit the Web site to register: http://www.acm.org/membership/student/
Plus handouts and on-line assignments TBA
Recommended Texts
Raskin, J. The Humane Interface. Addison Wesley, 2000. ISBN:
0201379376.
Lidwell, Holden, Butler. Universal Principles of Design. Rockport,
2003. ISBN: 1592530079.
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.
| assignment | due date | weight |
| Interface analysis and redesign paper | 10.03.07 | 25% |
| Group outline of work | 10.17.07 | 05% |
| Group Project Blog | weekly | 10% |
| Research paper | 11.28.07 | 30% |
| Group Project and Presentation | 12.12.07 | 30% |
Professionalism
All work for this class is designed for use in a professional context, and thus needs to meet professional standards of content quality, document design, and document production.
You are responsible for being a productive and reliable group member. Any decision on your part that negatively affects your group will also affect your grade, and could affect your right to remain enrolled in the course.
I strongly recommend that you not miss class. You will will miss the lecture for that week, plus your ability to contribute effectively to your group project will be reduced.