Introduction to designing and evaluating user interfaces

 James A. Larson, PhD

Course description

Training, skill, and experience are needed to design user interfaces that are truly easy to learn and use. This course presents the theory and principles behind great user interfaces, and enables students to put the theory into practice by (1) specifying criteria for evaluating user interfaces, (2) implementing a variety of graphical user interfaces, and (3) applying the evaluation criteria to the user interface. Students should be able to apply the knowledge they gain form this course to design and evaluate both user interfaces using technologies available today and tomorrow.

Course goals

• Determine the appropriate dialog style, modes, and modalities of user interfaces
• Design and implement graphical user interfaces.
• Specify criteria for evaluating a user interface
• Write testable performance and usability criteria
• Design testing strategies and testing instruments
• Collect and evaluate performance and usability data

Introduction—Usability of Interactive Systems.

• Understand why usability is important
• Specify usability requirements, measurements, and metrics
• Learn UI design theories, principles, and guidelines
• Choose the appropriate dialog style (user-directed, system-directed, mixed-initiative
• Choose the appropriate media and modalities (GUI, VUI, MMUI)
• Determine the degree of user involvement (direct manipulation, agent-directed)

Manage the User Interface Lifecycle

• Identify users’ problems by shadowing and ethnography field studies
• Specify user interface requirements by interviews and surveys
• Implement GUI user interfaces
• Evaluate and refine prototypes via Wizard of Oz experiments and focus groups
• Maximize quality assurance and user acceptance by controlled testing
• Refine and enhance due to monitoring after deployment

Evaluate Interface Designs.

• Write testable performance criteria
• Write testable usability criteria
• Designing testing strategies and testing instruments
• Log data to measure performance criteria
• Survey users to measure usability criteria
• Iteratively test both inside and outside of the laboratory.

User Interface Design Issues

• Multiuser user interfaces for collaborative applications
• Direct manipulation vs specifying instructions to an agent
• Anthropomorphic designs.
• Searching, filtering, and browsing
• Information visualization
• Managing the tradeoffs between user and business requirements
• Help manuals, tutorials, and online help in context

Upon the successful completion of this course students will be able to

• Determine the appropriate user interface style for an application
• Design and implement graphical user interfaces.
• Write testable performance and usability criteria
• Design testing strategies and testing instruments
• Collect and evaluate performance and usability.