Time to teach a User Experience-related class at Bowling Green State University again. I have taught a class, as an adjunct, about every 10 years: in 2006 & 2016, it was the graduate class in Human Issues in Computing.
This time it is the undergraduate Usability Engineering course, CS3240. (A “legacy” title, but the core is still relevant.)
CS3240 was one of the first undergraduate courses on usability in the US. My mentor, Laura Leventhal, co-wrote a textbook for the class back in 2007.
I’ll be using Interaction Design by Preece/Rogers/Sharp and supplementing it with other readings. And inviting guest speakers!
I am also reviewing material from my various industry presentations to use in the class. Otherwise the whole class might be just my rambling stories from industry. I’ll post some of the teaching material here, in case anyone else finds it useful.
I still have A LOT of other planning for the class to do (e.g., Canvas, argh). It starts on January 13th (next week), so I will be figuring it out as I go along, with the students’ help.
A few excerpts from the current version of the syllabus.
Course Description
- Human-computer interaction: an essential part of the Computer Science discipline
- User interface design, dialog styles, screen layouts: the core, but not everything
- Understanding users: applied psychology/sociology, user-centered design
- Usable interface design and prototyping: to help think & to help build
- Usability testing: for iterative improvement, evaluation, and more
Learning Outcomes
- I understand how the user interface characteristics of everyday objects affect their usability.
- I understand the history of user interface design and why it has become increasingly important to software development.
- I can explain the differences among the roles in User Experience, such as usability engineering, interactive design, user experience design, and information architecture.
- I can describe human-centered-design and usability engineering processes and their roles in system design and development.
- I can discuss different interaction styles and designs, their advantages and disadvantages, and under what circumstances their use is appropriate.
- I can demonstrate skills for prototyping and describe the strengths and weaknesses of a variety of prototyping techniques.
- I can conduct usability evaluations both by using standards and guidelines and by testing with representative users.
More later! I suspect I will re-learn as much as the students learn. That’s one reason I do it.