Prerequisites
None. Assignments will involve user testing, paper prototyping, and implementing a prototype of a working design, using some computational medium. However, you can select how to implement your solutions, and you can choose whether to use HTML with an editor like Adobe Dreamweaver, Flash, Microsoft Expressions Blend/Sketchflow, or even PowerPoint. Thus, everyone from non-programmers to expert programmers are welcome. No background in HCI is expected.
Corequisites
None.
Grading
| Assignment | Percent of Final Grade |
|---|---|
| Homework 0 | -- |
| Homework 1 | 12% |
| Homework 2 | 12% |
| Homework 3 | 12% |
| Homework 4 | 12% |
| Homework 5 | 12% |
| Homework 6 | 10% |
| Final Exam | 30% |
Textbook
New for 2010! Free Textbook this year! My colleagues are writing a major new textbook, and we will be using a draft of the textbook in 2010. In exchange for helping review and fix up the textbook, everyone in the class this year will get a free hardcopy of the current draft! The textbook will be handed out in an early class to students who
are registered and do not drop the course. (This also means you will have a chance to influence the contents of this important new book!)
H. Rex Hartson and Pardha S. Pyla, The UX Book: Ensuring a Quality User Experience, to be published by Morgan Kaufmann / Elsevier in 2011. Book Website 
Other useful resources
Beyer, H. and Holtzblatt, K., Contextual Design: Defining Customer-Centered Systems. 1998, San Francisco, CA: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Inc. ISBN: 1-55860-411-1 (paperback)
Author's site ;
or Amazon
Jakob Nielsen. Usability Engineering. Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco, 1994. ISBN 0-12-518406-9 (paperback) [updated from the the older hardcover: ISBN 0-12-518405-0].
Author's site ;
or Amazon
Donald A. Norman, The Design of Everyday Things. Basic Books; 1st Basic edition (September 2002), ISBN: 0-465-06710-7 (paperback) [updated from the original 1988 hardcover version]. Author's site ;
or Amazon