6.831 • User Interface Design and Implementation

Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Fall Semester, 2006

Lectures & Readings

L1: Introduction to Usability

Lecture notes

L2: User-Centered Design

Lecture notes
The 1984 Olympic Message System: a test of behavioral principles of system design by John Gould et al. CACM, v30 n9, 1987. [Off-campus access through MIT Libproxy]

L3: Human Capabilities

Lecture notes
Beyond Fitts's law: models for trajectory-based HCI tasks by Johnny Accot and Shumin Zhai. CHI '97. [Off-campus access through MIT Libproxy]
Optional: Chapter 2: "The Human Information Processor", in The Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction, by Stuart Card, Thomas Moran, and Allen Newell, 1983.

L4: UI Software Architecture

Lecture notes
The Model-View-Controller Design Pattern, from The Cocoa Fundamentals Guide, Chapter 5, Section 4, by Apple Computer, Inc., 2006.
Optional: A Description of the Model-View-Controller User Interface Paradigm in the Smalltalk-80 System by Glenn E. Krasner and Stephen T. Pope. JOOP, v1 n3, 1988.

L5: Design Principles

Lecture notes
First Principles of Interaction Design by Bruce Tognazzini
Ten Usability Heuristics by Jakob Nielsen
The Case Against User Interface Consistency by Jonathan Grudin. CACM, v32 n10, October 1989. [Off-campus access through MIT Libproxy]
Optional: Chapter 5 in Usability Engineering by Jakob Nielsen.

L6: Output

Lecture notes
Glyphs: Flyweight Objects for User Interfaces by Paul R. Calder and Mark A. Linton. UIST '90. [Off-campus access through MIT Libproxy]

L7: Prototyping

Lecture notes
Prototyping for Tiny Fingers by Marc Rettig. CACM, v37 n4, April 1994. [Off-campus access through MIT Libproxy]
The Perils of Prototyping by Alan Cooper. 1994.

L8: Input

Lecture notes
A new model for handling input by Brad Myers. ACM TOIS, v8 n3, July 1990. [Off-campus access through MIT Libproxy]

L9: Declarative UI

Lecture notes
TBA

L10: Graphic Design

Lecture notes
Applying a theory of graphical presentation to the graphic design of user interfaces by Jock Mackinlay. UIST '88. [Off-campus access through MIT Libproxy]
Optional: Designing Visual Interfaces by Kevin Mullet and Darrell Sano. Prentice Hall, 1995.

L11: Output 2

Lecture notes
Systematic output modification in a 2D user interface toolkit by Keith Edwards, Scott Hudson, Joshua Marinacci, Roy Rodenstein, Thomas Rodriguez, and Ian Smith. UIST '97. [Off-campus access through MIT Libproxy]

L12: Predictive Evaluation

Lecture notes
The GOMS family of user interface analysis techniques: comparison and contrast by Bonnie John and David Kieras. ACM TOCHI, v3 n4, December 1996. [Off-campus access through MIT Libproxy]

L13: Animation

Lecture notes
Animation: from cartoons to the user interface by Bay-Wei Chang and David Ungar. UIST '93 [Off-campus access through MIT Libproxy]

L14: Heuristic Evaluation

Lecture notes
Heuristic Evaluation by Jakob Nielsen. Read the first four pages:

How to conduct a heuristic evaluation
A list of ten recommended heuristics for usable interface design
A more detailed discussion of the characteristics of the usability problems found by heuristic evaluation
How to rate the severity of the usability problems

Describing usability problems: are we sending the right message? by Joseph Dumas, Rolf Molich, and Robin Jeffries. interactions, v11 n4, July/August 2004. [Off-campus access through MIT Libproxy]

L15: Undo

Lecture notes
A selective undo mechanism for graphical user interfaces based on command objects by Thomas Berlage. ACM TOCHI, v1 n3, September 1994. [Off-campus access through MIT Libproxy]

L16: User Testing

Lecture notes
Guidelines for user observation by Kathleen Gomoll & Anne Nicol, from User Observation: Guidelines for Apple Developers, January 1990.

L17: Toolkits

Lecture notes

L18: Experiment Design & Analysis

Lecture notes
Optional: "Methodology matters: doing research in the behavioral and social sciences" by Joseph E. McGrath, in Readings in Human-Computer Interaction: Toward the Year 2000, R. M. Baecker and J. Grudin and W. A. S. Buxton, ed.

L19: Guest Lecture: UI Design for Software Developers

A guest lecture by Greg Raiz (Raizlabs) and Matt Belge (Vision & Logic), experienced UI design consultants and leaders of BostonCHI, the local interest group for HCI professionals and researchers.

No readings

L20: HCI Research Topics

Lecture notes