Syllabus

Interaction Design
Course Overview
People are intrinsically active. We act in order to satisfy our basic needs, such as
for food and shelter, and to satisfy our higher level needs, such as for love and
meaning. But we always act within some social context: we act in concert with
others, and many of our basic needs are social in nature. Because of our biological
endowments, we are able to shape our biophysical environment in specific ways to
help us satisfy our needs. Some of these ways concern the intentional design of
physical objects, which we call "tools" or "instruments" or "technologies". Tools—
including digital artifacts—represent crystalizations of knowledge accumulated
historically by people who have encountered various circumstances in the past.
These tools influence human interaction as well as individual cognition and activity.
In turn, people shape the tools that they use, both through intentional acts of
creation and through "thoughtless acts" of directed activity. We act through these
technologies, and though we shape them, we likewise are shaped by them.

Interaction design concerns the deliberate shaping of interactive artifacts for use by
people to satisfy their needs within social contexts. Because these artifacts exist
within these social settings, they become resources from which people construct
their social, political, economic, and moral lives.

We will not concentrate on "theories of interaction design", though you will implicitly
be exposed to some. Rather, you will do interaction design; you will be interaction
designers for your short time here. More than anything this means cultivating your
ability to envision. You will envision the design of technologies that do not yet exist
but, if realized, will result in net benefits for the people involved and affected. Doing
interaction design is thus both a technical as well as a moral enterprise. Shaping
the future comes with responsibilities.

The basic activities of this enterprise will involve understanding user's needs,
brainstorming, sketching, making design tradeoffs, choosing from among design
alternatives, representing, communicating, and critiqueing designs, prototyping,
usability testing, and reflecting on design activity.

Student Learning Goals

The student learning goals for the course are to:

1. carry out user inquiry to understand human needs in particular contexts;

2. construct design sketches and prototypes to manifest design ideas;
3. construct narratives of use so as to envision designs in use;
 4. reflect on the design process to make learning visible;
5. carry out usability studies to get feedback on the user experience.

This course contributes to the following MS degree objectives:

 have the necessary skills and knowledge to independently conduct investigative

work in selected sub-areas of computing/technology;
 have a broad understanding of the technologies and theories supporting the
architecture and construction of software systems;
 be able to pursue successful careers or subsequent postgraduate studies while
adapting to emerging technologies;
 be able to analyze issues and synthesize solutions to computing-related
problems;

Readings
Weekly readings are drawn from a number of textbooks, conference/journal papers,
and practitioner writings and listed here. The schedule of the readings for each
week is provided at the end of the syllabus

1. Beyer, Hugh and Karen Holtzblatt. "Principles of contextual inquiry" (Chapter

3), from Contextual design: defining customer-centered systems, Morgan
Kaufmann, 1998.
2. Beyer, Hugh and Karen Holtzblatt. "Work models" (Chapter 6),
from Contextual design: defining customer-centered systems, Morgan
Kaufmann, 1998.
3. Buchenau, Marion and Suri, Jane. "Experience prototyping". In Proceedings
of the 3rd Conference on Designing Interactive Systems: Processes,
Practices, Methods, and Techniques, 2000.
4. Buxton, Bill. pp105-114, pp234-251, and pp330-359 from Sketching user
experiences, Morgan Kaufmann, 2007.
5. Clark, Andy. "Natural born cyborgs?", from M. Beynon, C.L. Nehaniv, and K.
Dautenhahn (Eds.): Cognitive Technology 2001, Lecture Notes in Artifical
Intelligence 2117, pp. 17-24, Springer-Verlag, 2001.
6. Dix, Alan, Janet Finlay, Gregory Abowd, and Russell Beale. "Evaluation
Techniques" (Chapter 9), from Human-Computer Interaction, 3rd edition.
Pearson Education Limited, 2004.
7. Friedman, Batya and Peter Kahn, Jr. "Human values, ethics, and design"
from J. A. Jacko and A. Sears (Eds.), The human-computer interaction
handbook (pp. 1177-1201). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates,
2003.
8. Hollan, James, Edwin Hutchins, and David Kirsh. "Distributed Cognition:
Toward a New Foundation for Human-Computer Interaction
Research." ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 7(2):174-
196, 2000.
 9. Krug, Steve, “Usability Testing on 10 Cents a Day” (chapter 9) from Don’t
Make me Think, New Riders, 2005.
10. Lofland, John and Lyn Lofland. "Getting in" (Chapter 3), from Analyzing
social settings: A guide to qualitative observation and analysis, 3rd edition,
Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1995.
11. Moggridge, Bill. "People and Prototypes" pp665-681 from Designing
interactions, MIT Press, 2007.
12. Norman, Donald. "The psychopathology of everyday things" (Chapter 1)
from The design of everyday things, Basic Books, 1988.
13. Rettig, Marc. "Prototyping for tiny fingers." Communications of the
Association for Computing Machinery, 37(4): 21-27, 1994.
14. Saffer, Dan. "Interface design basics" (Chapter 6) from Designing for
interaction: creating smart appliances and clever devices, New Riders, 2007.
15. Sharp, Helen, Yvonne Rogers and Jenny Preece, "Data collection" (Chapter
7), from Interaction design: beyond human-computer interaction, 2nd edition,
John Wiley and Sons, 2007.
16. Suri, Jane. pp162-180, from Thoughtless acts? Observations on intuitive
design. Chronicle Books, 2005.

Coursework
This course is a 5-credit graduate level course. As such, it will require a
considerable amount from you, in terms of both time, energy, and commitment. I
consider the following an estimate of the minimal amount of time that this course
will require each week: 4 hours of class attendance, 3 hours for reading and
summaries, 2 hours for group meetings, 7 hours of project work, all totaling 16
hours. If you believe that you are unable to meet these time commitments due to
external constraints, then please discuss this with the instructor immediately. This
may result in your reducing some of your external commitments or deferring
attendance in this course for a term in which you have fewer such constraints.

Each assignment is to be handed in no later than the start of class on the specified
due date. Late assignments will not be accepted. It is recommended that you turn
in something rather than nothing, even if it is incomplete. With due cause,
exceptions to this policy will need to be negotiated with the instructor; emergency
documentation may be required and/or late penalties may be given, depending
upon the circumstances.

The assignments are as follows. The percentages indicated below are the grade
weightings for the final grade calculation. Each assignment is described in more
detail below.

 Project: 66% total, with each deliverable weighted equally (21%).

  Weekly Reports: 8% total, with each week equally weighted (1% per week -
your lowest weekly score that received a grade of at least 2 will be dropped).
 Writings on readings: 20% total, with each week equally weighted (your
lowest weekly score of at least 2 will be dropped).
 Pre- and Post-course surveys: 6% total (3% each).

Project

This course is centered around a term-length design project carried out in groups.
You are to design to a design brief that I will provide you with, using the theoretical
and methodological tools that we explore during class sessions and in readings.
The project is completed in a set of deliverables, each of which is given a grade
and critique by the professor. Deliverables are due approximately every three
weeks. Each deliverable will be publicly presented. Between each deliverable is
one or more ungraded check-ins, which will involve in-class presentation and
critique of your deliverable-under-development.

Each deliverable includes one or more manifestations of your design ideas (e.g.
sketches, prototypes, videos), and a design portfolio. The required design
manifestations will be specified separate for each deliverable. The initial ones will
involve simple sketches, and the final ones will involve interactive prototypes that
you will usability test with users. Your design manifestations will be graded based
on the extent to which they 1) satisfy the design brief subject to the constraints
under which you are operating, and 2) reflect your use of the tools that we have
been studying and practicing with during and outside of the class sessions.

Your design portfolio consists of six (6) design artifacts and a narrative. A
design artifact is something that your group creates that either represents your
design at some point in its evolution, (such as a sketch, a click-through, or a
screencast, any of which might refer to ideas that you have abandoned) or
the process of creating your design (such as a photo of a whiteboard brainstorm,
notes from an interview, or sketches that you discarded). Since your design
portfolio is electronic, any artifact that was originally in some other media (e.g.
whiteboard, paper) needs to be captured in digital form in a single file (e.g. as a
jpeg image). Provide a file name for each artifact that is clear and descriptive.

The narrative describes the reasons why your design is the way it is and not some
other way. It needs to answer all of the why questions that another designer would
have about your design. In telling this story, it is important to connect the design to:

 the design brief,

 what you learn from critiques (by students and instructors),
 what you learn from working with people (some of whom may be users),
 what you learn in your work together as a group,
 what you learn from readings.
In discussing your work with users, make sure to indicate how and when you
interacted with which particular users for what purposes.

Your narrative should be a single pdf document, and each artifact needs to be
represented in this narrative by a single image of not more than one page. Caption
each image with a label that closely corresponds to the filename of the artifact that
it represents.

Your portfolio will be graded based on 1) the extent to which the narrative
has coherence, i.e., does it make sense as a story, 2) the narrative's completeness,
i.e. does it account for the main decisions, 3) the connectedness of your artifacts to
the narrative, i.e. do your artifacts provide insight into the story that you are telling?

Weekly Reports

You are required to have a weekly meeting with your project group at a regularly
scheduled time for a minimum of 1.5 hours. The intent of this meeting is to
synchronize efforts, build group cohesiveness, identify deviations from targeted
delivery dates, establish work commitments, and validate the successful (or
unsuccessful) completion of previous commitments. Additionally, subsets of your
group may wish to meet together for purposes of carrying out some of the specific
project tasks. You may also require additional full-group meetings at different times
during the project.

Each week, you are expected to hand-in minutes and a task matrix, each of which
is detailed below. If you have met more than once during the week, then each
meeting should be run and documented as specified in this document. Your task
matrices (see below) should summarize the tasks committed to by group members.
For purposes of the task matrix a "week" begins and ends on the day of your
regularly scheduled meeting.

Minutes

The minutes for each meeting should include:

 The group name,

 meeting date, start time, end time, and location,
 who was the facilitator and minute taker,
 who attended and who was absent,
 one paragraph that summarizes 1) what was discussed, and 2) what group
decisions were agreed to.

Task Matrices

Each week, you will update your task matrices. A task matrix is a table that clearly
documents who has committed to what tasks to be completed when for the week.
Each task for each person should be listed in its own row, and all rows (tasks)
associated with each person should be grouped consecutively. If two people are
undertaking the same task, list these tasks separately for each person. In this way,
you can keep track of who has fulfilled their task commitments and who has not.

You should keep a single spreadsheet that clearly specifies each person's
responsibilities. Add each week to the end of the spreadsheet. Each person should
fill out their actual time to completion for the current week's commitments prior to
arriving at the next weekly meeting. For the upcoming week, you should list the
responsibilities each person has committed to, providing due dates and estimates
for completion times but not actual dates and completion times until these tasks are
completed.

Writings on readings

There are readings required for each week, as specified in the schedule. Writings
on readings will be due the first class session of each calendar week, except for the
weeks when you have a deliverable due on the first class session. For each
separate reading greater than 10 pages, write two paragraphs of five to six
sentences each that summarizes the reading. This summary will provide an
overview of the contents of the article, not your reation to it. If there is more than
one chapter by the same author for the same week, provide only a single
paragraph per chapter. If the reading is 10 pages or less, then write only a single
paragraph for the reading.

These readings represent accumulated cultural knowledge; understanding what

past experts have already learned allows you to leverage some of their effort in
your design work. Thus, my judgement in grading these readings concerns the
extent to which it appears that you have read and understood the readings.

Pre- and Post-course surveys

In helping me to evaluate this course, I will ask you to fill out a couple of brief
surveys: one at the start of the course and the other at the end. You will not be
graded on the content of your answers; full credit will be awarded if you respond to
each of the questions. However, you need to complete both surveys on time in
order to get credit for either. You can find links to the surveys on the course
homepage.

Please do not look up answers on the Internet for either of the surveys!. This
will not increase your grade, and it will make this survey less informative to me.

Grading
Unless otherwise specified, each assignment will receive an integer score between
0 and 4, inclusive. Your grade on each assignment will be a weighted sum of the
grade on each part. Your final grade for the course will be calculated by taking the
weighted sum of grades on all work that you have handed in, and rounding to the
closest 1/10th. That is, multiply each score that you receive by the weight of the
assignment, add these together, then round to the nearest 0.1. The
correspondence between numeric grades and letter grades (i.e., A, B, C, etc.) can
be found in the UW University Handbook, v.4, Ch.11.

Schedule of Topics and Readings

Week Topic Reading

1 The Design Process Suri: “Observations on intuitive design”
Brainstorming Moggridge: “People and Prototypes”

2 Interviews & observations Sharp et al “Data collection”

Ethics of working with users Lofland & Lofland “Getting in”
Sketching Buxton, pp105-114 from Sketching User
Experiences
3 Contextual Inquiry Beyer & Holtzblatt: “Principles of Contextual
Inquiry” and “Work models”
Making Sense of Data
4 Dynamic prototypes Buxton: pp234-251
Paper prototypes Rettig: “Prototyping for tiny fingers”
5 Storytelling Krug: “Usability Testing on 10 Cents a Day”
Usability Studies
Click-throughs
6 Envisionment Videos Buxton: pp330-359
Conceptual Mappings, Norman: “The psychopathology of everyday
Affordances things”

7 Interface Design Saffer: “Interface design basics”

8 Experience Prototyping Buchenau & Suri: “Experience prototyping”

Evaluation Dix et al: “Evaluation techniques”

9 Distributed Cognition Hollan et al: “Distributed cognition: toward a new

foundation for human-computer interaction”
Value-centered design Friedman & Kahn: “Human values, ethics, and
design”
Clark: “Natural-born cyborgs”
10 Project Presentations No readings
Project Retrospectives
Course Critique