Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Spring Semester, 2009

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

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

L5: Task Analysis

• Lecture notes

L6: Output

• Lecture notes

L7: Generating Designs

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

L8: Input

• Lecture notes

L9: Visibility

• Lecture notes

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

• Lecture notes

L12: User Control & Freedom

• Lecture notes

L13: User Testing

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

L14: Errors

• Lecture notes

L15: Graphic Design

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

L16: Constraints & Layout

• Lecture notes

L17: Efficiency

• Lecture notes

L18: Predictive Evaluation

• Lecture notes
• 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

• Lecture notes

L20: Alpha Compositing

• Lecture notes

L21: Transforms & Clipping

• Lecture notes

L22: 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]

L23: Threads & Timers

• Lecture notes

L24: Accessibility

• Lecture notes
• Accessibility in Video Games by Eitan Glinert

L25: Internationalization

• Lecture notes

L26: Animation

• Lecture notes

L27: Experiment Design & Analysis

• Lecture notes

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

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Copyright © 2009 by Robert C. Miller. All rights reserved.