Final exam

The final exam for in-class students will be held Thursday November 18 at 5:45. DL students must register to schedule their own time to take the exam.

The final exam will have a format similar to the midterm exam. It is worth 50 points for 25% of the course grade. By the day you take the exam, you should also submit your assessment of team member contributions including your statement reflecting over the team projects.

HCI 440 Course Review

The following are stages for user-centered design. For each stage, a list of methods is provided. We practiced the starred methods in the class projects.

Requirements analysis

Also called user and task analysis. This stage involves learning about people, their goals and how they accomplish their goals.

• Contextualized interview*
• Competitive research*
• Traditional interview
• Field observation
• Survey
• Participatory analysis

Methods for specifying user and task analysis

• Scenarios*
• User profiles*
• Hierarchical task diagrams
• User/task matrices
• Feature lists*
• Artifact-centered descriptions

Conceptual design

This stage involves choosing funcationality and conceptually organizing it at the abstract level.

• Card sorting*
• Sticky note organization*
• Derived from user and problem analysis*
• Cooperative design (aka participatory design)
• Storyboarding
• Brainstorming
• Applying metaphors and users' mental models

Detailed design

• Paper and pencil prototyping*
• Understanding and selecting among interaction styles (direct manipulation versus command-based)
• Applying constraints from human behavior (e.g. memory, perception, motor skill)
• Visual grouping
• Page grouping
• Applying affordances
• Using helpful labels (text or icon)

Evaluation

• Usability testing*
• Use of guidelines such as Nielsen's heuristic evaluation
• Walkthroughs
• Card, Moran and Newell's Keystroke Level Model

Implementation

• User event loop
• Window managers and toolkits
• Interactive graphical tools (e.g visual basic)
• Code-based constraints (Java layout managers)
• Hyptertext
• Object-oriented programming

Additional topics

These include additional information on model of human performance and topics covered during the last 2 weeks of class.

Relevant articles

The following two articles present HCI methods that practitioners find most effective (based on surveys):

• A Toolkit for Strategic Usability
• A Survey of User-Centered Design Practice

This article appears in today's (Thursday November 11) NY Times. It describes a particular case where user-centered design was not followed:

• Wanted by the Police: A Good Interface