6.831 • User Interface Design and Implementation

Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Spring Semester, 2008

Lectures & Readings

L1: 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: 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.

L4: Learnability

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The Case Against User Interface Consistency by Jonathan Grudin. CACM, v32 n10, October 1989. [Off-campus access through MIT Libproxy]

L5: Task Analysis

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L6: Output

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L7: Generating Designs

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"About Patterns" in Designing Interfaces: Patterns for Effective Interaction Design by Jenifer Tidwell, O'Reilly, 2005.

L8: Input

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L9: Visibility

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L10: Prototyping

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

L11: Declarative UI

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L12: User Control & Freedom

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L13: User Testing

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

L14: Errors

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L15: Graphic Design

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Optional: Designing Visual Interfaces by Kevin Mullet and Darrell Sano. Prentice Hall, 1995.

L16: Constraints & Layout

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L17: Efficiency

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L18: Predictive Evaluation

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Using the Keystroke-Level Model to Estimate Execution Times by David Kieras.
Optional: 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]

L19: Color Design

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L20: Alpha Compositing

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L21: Transforms & Clipping

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L22: Heuristic Evaluation

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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]

L23: Threads & Timers

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L24: Accessibility

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Accessibility in Video Games by Eitan Glinert

L25: Internationalization

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L26: Animation

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L27: Experiment Design & Analysis

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L28: Touch and Other Modalities

PlayAnywhere: a compact interactive tabletop projection-vision system by Andrew D. Wilson. UIST 2005. [Off-campus access through MIT Libproxy]

L29: Ubiquitous Computing

The Computer for the 21st Century by Mark Weiser. Scientific American, September 1991.

L30: Information Visualization

Voyagers and Voyeurs: Supporting Asynchronous Collaborative Information Visualization by Jeffrey Heer, Fernanda Viégas, and Martin Wattenberg. CHI 2007.

L31: Speech Recognition Interfaces

Guest lecture by Blade Kotelly (Endeca)
No reading

L32: Conclusion

No reading