Riander

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User-Centered Design / Usability Engineering

15 consecutive Thursday evenings, 6:30-9:30pm
Last offered February 10 - May 18, 2000

What makes a product (or system or website or...) "usable"? How can usability be "engineered"? Is "usability" enough? When should techniques of user-centered "design" be applied? What should precede design? What roles should ethnography play? Who should be involved? What affects our approaches to designing user interfaces and our opinions of user interface quality? What are the limitations/dangers of various techniques/approaches?

This workshop explores answers to these and related questions about contemporary approaches to designing or contributing to the design of usable (and useful and desirable) products/systems/websites/..., providing you with experience at using different approaches and enabling you to identify or formulate approaches best suited to you and your organization's needs.

Topics addressed include:

• the nature of usability, usability engineering, & user-centered design
• software user interface widgets/devices/styles
• design standards and guidelines
• consistency versus transparency
• user testing & other means of assessing/predicting usability (e.g., heuristic evaluation)
• usability objectives
• task analysis
• scenarios & use cases
• iteration & collaboration
• contextual inquiry & ethnography
• participatory design
• prototyping (low-fidelity and high-fidelity)
• metaphor
• design rationale
• role playing, story-telling, & improvisation
• integrating usability engineering & user-centered design with product/system development life cycles
• costs/benefits of user-centered design & usability engineering
• cognitive/cultural structures that affect designer/manager/user behavior and opinion
• organizational interfaces / groupware
• approaching usability engineering & user-centered design within the context of process improvement
• dealing with real-world constraints
• adoption strategies for & the future of usability engineering & user-centered design

The course is intended for designers, developers, product or project managers, marketing personnel, human factors engineers & usability specialists, user experience architects, software engineers, content specialists, brand strategists, quality assurance personnel, planners, and others who affect or are affected by product/system/web/... usability, usefulness, and desirability.

Instructor: Richard Anderson

Sample Student Evaluations:

• "Excellent instructor. I learned so much from him, and it will continue to resonate throughout my professional life."
• "Richard does a wonderful job of presenting and championing usability and user-centered design."
• "Class was always fun. Made great friends and contacts. Excellent coverage of usability history and current techniques.."
• "Great human approach to subject matter. He's obviously using his usability principles in how he teaches. The readings and assignments were very ambitious for an extension class, but his expectations tempered this."
• "Both course and instructor were excellent! My understanding of this field has matured immensely over the semester."
• "He was great! His style of teaching involved the entire class and got you to think more about important issues."
• "Great course -- really enjoyed the interactive format and the respect the instructor paid his students."

• "Richard is an excellent teacher. I was amazed by his ability to engage the class."
• "This has been an excellent course. Richard's pedagogy and the course content was just what I needed for my professional development. It's been very stimulating."
• "Great course, great instructor! I both had fun and gained very useful knowledge."
• "A good interviewer, skilled at drawing students into a conversation. Voice sounds like Martin Mull."
• "Outstanding class, provided a solid foundation in the theory and practice of usability and interface design."
• "Very comprehensive -- would like to send several of my coworkers and employees."
• "Very effective for students who are prepared to think."
• "Great instructor, good sense of humor."

• "Great instructor and methodology. Very stimulating course. Richard is an excellent facilitator and has exposed us to a wide variety of usability techniques and experts in the field (via the reading he has provided). The class exercises helped me to feel confident that I understand the techniques. Thank You!"
• "Richard has a clear and comprehensive understanding of the subject matter. He has a wry wit and an obvious interest in this area that make the course very enjoyable."
• "The sign of an excellent teacher, I feel, is the ability to make even the most stubborn among us (me) question our assumptions. Richard is just such a teacher, and I feel privileged to have taken his class."
• "I highly enjoyed the instructor's pedagogy -- facilitating thought -- discussion b/u students presenting tools and leaving judgments to each student."
• "Great!"

• "Excellent class; already started using many of the tools discussed in class; homework was a little intense since we all have full-time jobs, but probably wouldn't have gotten thu as many readings without the homework assignments."
• "Great course -- the breadth & depth of the materials was excellent. Richard's path through the materials was well thought out & designed to stimulate discussion."
• "Excellent course presented with just the right mix of readings, lecture, discussion. Extremely relevant and applicable."
• "Immensely practical, this course provides many concrete examples of corporations large and small and their quest to produce usable products."
• "Well worth the time and effort. Richard knows the subject well and has a wonderful teaching style."
• "This course was a pleasure to attend. I learned much & was exposed to new concepts by the instructor & fellow students."

• "Richard is fabulous! Extremely knowledgeable, charismatic, thoughtful, and a superb teacher. It is obvious that he carefully designed the course for maximum absorption and understanding. All-in-all -- Amazing."
• "Excellent course design, very thoughtful progression of material, assignments relevant to my own work, designed to help students internalize material."
• "I thought this was just a fantastic class. It made me think about user interface design in a much broader sense than just widget reflection -- making me think about users and their work."
• "Excellent resource, engaging instructor. Well worth the time and expenses."
• "Excellent presentation of this subject matter. Richard does a great job of involving entire class in projects and discussions. This class was surprisingly enjoyable despite the time commitment required for the class."

• "Excellent! In class group exercises, the readings and papers, and his presentations were outstanding. Many thanks for opening the world of HCI to me!"
• "The course did an excellent job of covering a broad amount of material to a sufficient level of depth."
• "Thoroughly enjoyed the course. I learned alot from the course, and I especially liked the workshop nature of it -- eveybody collaboratively worked and was involved in assignments."
• "It was an honor to have Richard Anderson as our instructor."
• "Now I know which toasters to look under for cockroaches."

• "Excellent application of modern educational methods. He encouraged reflection, constructive learning, collaboration, learning in real contexts."
• "Excellent course. One of the most interesting and challenging I have ever taken. Creative, thought-provoking, and fun!"
• "This was the best class I've ever had. Every week's class/material was an answer to a previous overwhelming subject. Everything was applicable in the 'real world.' Thanks."
• "Outstanding, motivating, insightful, stimulating, approachable."
• "Great fun, stimulating, excellent projects and assignments"
• "Challenging and worth every bit of work."

• "An excellent approach to a nebulous and difficult subject, concentrating on Socratic method and forcing us to think our way through the material. He didn't present one true way, but let us muddle our way through. And a pleasant surprise at the end was our being encouraged and enabled to apply the information to our own projects at work. An extremely valuable, well-designed class!"
• "Excellent pedagogy"
• "I taught graduate classes in Comp Sci for ten years. If I start to do that again, I will make major changes in my teaching methods and techniques based on the very effective methods and techniques."
• "The instructor made learning fun!"
• "Way cool, dude"

• "This course was extremely effective in the application of the information covered to my real-world. The workshop format inspired, challenged, and made fun the process of learning. Hear, Hear!"
• "Great job! Made the field very interesting."
• "Abundance of material (lifetime supply), very practical, fun exercises. Everything you ever wanted to know about usability engineering."
• "Richard was very good at giving credance to varying opinions and helping me to take a more eclectic, less rigid approach to this complex field. Thanks!"
• "Very well-prepared. Very interested in subject. Very interested in students. Excellent instructor."
• "Absolutely magnificent speaker."

• "Richard's creativity and enthusiasm for the material really made this class. His comments were stimulating, the class was well-organized & cohesive. I can't say enough good things about this class."
• "Brought much more depth and breadth to the subject than I imagined existed! Excellent use of academic literature (papers) to illumintate points, stimulate discussion."
• "Excellent grasp of what's going on in the industry as well as the research aspects. Has a unique and valuable perspective that contributed much more than just the course curriculum."
• "Terrific class. I learned much more than in half a dozen other classes! I'll recommend it highly to colleagues. It was very professional and challenging."
• "I would continue to attend this course on Thursday evening indefinitely. Each meeting was energizing, interesting, and very useful. Thanks for everything, Richard."