Research Methods for Interaction Design
The goal of this course is to learn how to support good interaction design or interface design or application design through effective and focused user research. The course is designed to help you develop practical skills in user research and usability testing by participating in a series of focused user-research projects. We will also explore the principles that underlie research good practice.
You will be reading between 100-200 pages a week. You will also be participating in on-site observations of users for your particular research project. Written work will include user profiles, task flows, task scenarios, and documents used in usability testing such as test scripts and questionnaires used to screen test participants. You will also create a usability test report and highlights video for a "client" and prepare a group presentation of your research results.
Because all professional user research is done collaboratively, the focus of your work this semester will be group projects spanning a range of user research activities. Successful collaboration involves skills and strategies that can be developed and practiced. You are responsible for being a productive and reliable team member.
Required Texts:
User and Task Analysis, JoAnn Hackos
and Janice Redish
Handbook of Usability Testing, Jeffrey Rubin
Paper Prototyping, Carolyn Snyder
Articles and selected chapters as handouts
Dr. Kathryn Summers
Office: CR 500
Office phone: 410-837-6202
E-mail: ksummers@ubalt.edu.
Office hours: T, W, R 3:30-4:30 pm, and by appointment.
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.
Assignments:
Contextual Interview 30%
Image collaging20%
Usability test, video, report, presentation 50%