General Information

Overview

6.831 introduces the principles of user interface development, focusing on three key areas:

Design. We will look at how to design good user interfaces, covering important design principles (learnability, visibility, error prevention, efficiency, and graphic design) and the human capabilities that motivate them (including perception, motor skills, color vision, attention, and human error).
Implementation. We will see techniques for building user interfaces, including low-fidelity prototypes, Wizard of Oz, and other prototyping tools; input models, output models, model-view-controller, layout, constraints, and toolkits.
Evaluation. We will learn techniques for evaluating and measuring interface usability, including heuristic evaluation, predictive evaluation, and user testing.

Course material will include lecture notes and assigned readings, generally from research papers accessible on the Web.

Credits:	3-0-9 = 12 units of graduate H-level credit 6 Engineering Design Points Satisfies either the Computer Systems concentration or the Artificial Intelligence & Applications concentration
Prerequisites:	6.170 (or equivalent undergraduate software engineering experience)
Grading Scheme:	Based on problem sets, in-class quizzes, and a term project. The project will be to design, implement, and evaluate a user interface. Students may work in groups of two, three, or four people.
When:	Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, 12 - 1 pm, starting on Wednesday, February 6th (full calendar)
Where:	building 26, room 152

Grading

The largest contribution to your grade will be the course project (40%), in which you will work in small groups to design, implement, and evaluate a user interface.

Problem sets and homeworks will be assigned periodically, and will constitute 30% of your grade.

There will be two quizzes, given during class time, which together count for 20% of your grade. See the Course Calendar for the dates. There will be no final exam.

Preparation, attendance, and participation in class will also be a factor in your grade (10%). To prepare for each class, you will be expected to read the lecture notes in advance, and submit a short "reading memo" about what you read. These memos will contribute to this grade, as will your participation in class activities.

Course project (GR1-6)	40%
Problem sets (PS1-5) and homeworks (HW1-3)	30%
Two quizzes (Q1-2)	20%
Class participation	10%

Staff

		Email	Phone	Office	Office hours
Instructor	Prof. Rob Miller	rcm at mit.edu	x4-6028 (617-324-6028)	32-G716	Email for appointment.
Teaching Assistants	Michael Fitzgerald	mikefitz at mit.edu	none	none	Wednesdays, 2-4pm, 32-G 7th floor lounge
Teaching Assistants	Tiffany Wang	tiffanyw at mit.edu	none	none	Fridays, 2-4pm, 32-G 7th floor lounge

Mailing Lists

We provide 3 mailing lists (@lists.csail.mit.edu):

	Recipients	Purpose and Details
6831	all students and teaching staff	This list is available for class-wide announcements and discussion. Everybody who attends the first day will be subscribed to the list by default. New students can subscribe using this link: http://lists.csail.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/6831 If you don't want 6.831 email, you can unsubscribe yourself using the web interface, too. To see the collection of prior postings to the list, visit the 6.831 Archives.
6831staff	teaching staff only	This list is for students to ask the teaching staff questions or give comments. For example, if you encounter problems in debugging your programming assignments and group project prototypes, we encourage you to use this list rather than email only one of the teaching staff. Emails to this list are not publicly accessible.
6831handin	assignment inbox	This list is for submitting your assignments (it is managed by the TA Tiffany Wang). Note that for each assignment you must include its code in the subject (e.g., HW1 for homework #1, L3 for the reading memo for lecture 3). Emails to this list are not publicly accessible.

Recipients

Purpose and Details

6831

all students and teaching staff

This list is available for class-wide announcements and discussion. Everybody who attends the first day will be subscribed to the list by default. New students can subscribe using this link: http://lists.csail.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/6831

If you don't want 6.831 email, you can unsubscribe yourself using the web interface, too.

To see the collection of prior postings to the list, visit the 6.831 Archives.

6831staff

teaching staff only

This list is for students to ask the teaching staff questions or give comments. For example, if you encounter problems in debugging your programming assignments and group project prototypes, we encourage you to use this list rather than email only one of the teaching staff. Emails to this list are not publicly accessible.

6831handin

assignment inbox

This list is for submitting your assignments (it is managed by the TA Tiffany Wang). Note that for each assignment you must include its code in the subject (e.g., HW1 for homework #1, L3 for the reading memo for lecture 3). Emails to this list are not publicly accessible.

Course Materials

Readings, lecture notes, and assignments can be obtained from this web site: http://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.831/

Textbooks

There is no required textbook.

Recommended books:

Norman, The Design of Everyday Things, 1990.
This little book is a classic work on usability, not just of computer interfaces but also of physical objects like doors, showers, and stoves. Full of great anecdotes, plus theory about how users form models in their heads and how users make errors. Belongs on every engineer's shelf.
Nielsen, Usability Engineering, Academic Press, 1993.
Somewhat dated but still useful handbook for discount usability engineering, covering many of the evaluation techniques we'll be learning in this class.
Mullet & Sano, Designing Visual Interfaces, Prentice Hall, 1995.
A terrific guide to graphic design, chock full of examples, essential principles, and practical guidelines. Many programmers have a fear of graphic design. This book won't teach you everything—it still pays to hire a designer!—but it helps get over that fear and do a competent job of it yourself.

Good references:

Baecker, et. al., Readings in Human-Computer Interaction: Toward the Year 2000, Morgan Kaufmann, 1995.
Shneiderman, Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction, 4th ed., Addison-Wesley, 2004.
Dix et al, Human-Computer Interaction, 2nd ed., Prentice-Hall, 1998.
Olsen, Developing User Interfaces, Morgan Kaufmann, 1998.

Other books we like:

Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Graphics Press, 1983.
Raskin, The Humane Interface, ACM Press, 2000.
Johnson, GUI Bloopers: Don'ts and Dos for Software Developers and Web Designers, Morgan Kaufman, 2000.
Card, Moran, & Newell, The Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction, Lawrence Erlbaum, 1983.

Books about statistics and experiment design:

Gonick, Cartoon Guide to Statistics, Harper, 1994.
Box, Hunter, & Hunter. Statistics for Experimenters: An Introduction to Design, Data Analysis, and Model Building, Wiley, 1978.
Miller, Beyond Anova: Basics of Applied Statistics, Wiley, 1986.

Collaboration Policy

You may freely discuss assignments with other people, but you are expected to be intellectually honest and give credit where credit is due. In particular, for the individual assignments (PS1-5, HW1-3, and the reading memos), you should write your solutions entirely on your own; you should not share written materials with anyone else; and you should list all your collaborators (everyone you discussed the assignment with) on your handin.

6.831 • User Interface Design and Implementation

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