Principles of Interface Design
- Toronto: Tuesday, August 10
- San Francisco: Friday, October 8
- Copenhagen: Friday, October 22
Kathryn Whitenton
Raluca Budiu
Full-Day Tutorial
This course covers the most relevant concepts from human-computer interaction (HCI) and how they
determine the usability of interface designs. Humans, computers, and interactions all have basic
characteristics that tend to be stable over time: learning about them will give you a vocabulary to
analyze user interfaces to derive deeper, more conceptual and penetrating insights than simply saying
“this works” or “this doesn’t work.” This course tells you
why certain interactions work better for certain circumstances. Understanding the basic
tenets of human-computer interaction thus helps you design more effective websites and applications.
What You’ll Learn
- The components of an interactive system and the constraints that come with them
- Fundamental HCI research that forms the basis of current design principles
- How to think about a user interface in a principled way
- How to use HCI principles to develop usable, useful, and universal interfaces
Course Outline
- Introduction
- Brief history of human-computer interaction
- Humans in HCI
- Human information processing: an overview
- Perceptual-motor interaction and implications for HCI
- Mental models and their importance for operating devices
- Teaching mental models to the users
- Task-loading and stress in HCI
- Computers in HCI
- Input devices
- Keyboards and text entry; pointing devices
- Evaluation and analysis of input devices: Fitts’ Law, Hicks’ Law, Steering Law, Minimum Jerk Law
- Keystroke-level model and GOMS Analysis
- Modalities of interaction: speech, bimanual input, pen/gesture input, multitouch
- Output devices: displays, speech and auditory output
- Interaction style
- Direct Manipulation
- Menus, Forms, Dialogs
- Interaction devices
- Collaboration
- Multimodal interaction: screen readers
- Universal design: issues in designing for specific populations (such as kids, seniors, physically-disabled adults)
- Complex interface features
- Documentation and Online Help
- Information search
- Information visualization
- Response time
- Dealing with errors
- Development for HCI
- Requirements specification and task analysis
- The role of user experience and usability engineering
- Golden rules and heuristics
- HCI Patterns
Format
This full-day tutorial includes lecture, videos, exercises, and discussions.
Real-world examples (mainly from websites) are used to illustrate points throughout the day.
Handouts
Copies of the presentation slides
Who Should Attend
This course is for anyone involved in interface design decisions who do not have
formal training in human-computer interaction, but would like a better grounding in the theory that
determines which designs work best. This is a basic course; there are no prerequisites.
See Also:
This seminar teaches the principles of human-computer interaction, and how
they apply to web design. We offer another seminar, The Human Mind and Usability,
which focuses specifically on the human component and takes a psychology perspective. The overlap between
the two seminars is minimal; in the few cases where we do discuss the same concepts in the two seminars,
they are presented from different angles.
Instructors
Kathryn Whitenton is a User Experience Specialist with Nielsen Norman Group. Prior to joining NN/g,
Whitenton worked as a Usability Engineer with the University of Washington Libraries, where she led user research
and usability testing for the Libraries’ website. She also worked as a psychology researcher at the University
of Texas at Austin, where she managed a clinical research study funded by the National Institutes of Health. Whitenton
holds a Master of Library and Information Science degree from the University of Washington, and a B.A. in Psychology
and Plan II from the University of Texas at Austin.
Raluca Budiu is a User Experience Specialist with Nielsen Norman Group, where she presents
tutorials on academic research findings, mobile usability, and cognitive psychology for designers, and conducts
research worldwide on usability for mobile websites and children’s websites. She coauthored the
NN/g report on mobile usability. Previously, Budiu worked at
Xerox PARC, doing HCI research. At PARC, she built computational models of how people search for information in
visualizations of large data structures. She also explored new ways of measuring information scent and conducted
research on interfaces for social bookmarking systems and on the cognitive benefits of tagging. Budiu was also a
user researcher at Microsoft Corporation, where she explored future directions and made strategic recommendations
for incorporating user-generated content and social Web features into MSN. Budiu has authored more than 20
articles and conference presentations on HCI, psychology, and cognitive science. She has a PhD from Carnegie
Mellon University.
Presenting in San Francisco.
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