Course Syllabus

•  Course Schedule
•  Syllabus
•  Assignments

  Course Description

Whether you're a software designer, engineer, or user experience researcher, understanding what user interfaces are, how they're built, and what kinds of interfaces can exist is a critical literacy for interaction design. After all, user interfaces are a medium, like any other: painters need to understand paint, writers need to understand words, and anyone involved in designing, building, or understanding interactions with software needs to understand user interfaces.

 Student Learning Outcomes

By end of the course you will:

• Be able to describe major user interface concepts and paradigms
• Use a theory of user interfaces to describe, analyze, and critique user interface technology
• Describe major classes of inventions in user interface software and technology
• Identify open questions in user interface software and technology
• Conduct detailed assessments of product opportunities for user interface innovations

  Required Course Materials

The only required material for this course is Amy's free User Interface Software & Technology book. You will also be reading research papers, most of which are published in pay-walled digital libraries. Use the UW Libraries bookmarklet to access articles when off campus.

 Course Structure

The course is simple, involving reading, reading responses, discussion, and a series of assignments that culminate into a larger final design proposal.

Each week has the same basic structure:

• Tuesday: Reading responses due, class discussion and activity
• Thursday: Reading responses due, assignment due, class discussion and activity

Assignments will be weekly for the first half of the quarter, and then the second half of the course will involve open work time for the final project, due at the beginning of finals week.

In class, we will learn together in person in the Alumni House design studio. However, you can also participate remotely by joining the Ohyay classroom. There are number of reasons why you shouldn't come to class in person:

• The university shifted to online learning temporarily
• You're feeling sick (with COVID or any other illness)
• You're injured and have mobility issues
• You have caregiving duties
• You feel like you can learn remotely better for any reason

You don't have to explain, justify, or apologize for attending remotely; the course is designed to accommodate both modes of learning. There is value in the serendipity and lowered cost of communication that comes with collocation, and there is value in the flexibility and convenience of remote participation.

To support remote participation, we'll be using a platform called Ohyay, a room I've designed to serve the course's activities. In person students will see those online; online participants will see the room. When we're having discussions, we'll alternate between in-person and remote participants.

Out of class, if you have questions or feedback relevant to others in the class, post them in #hcid520-winter2022 in DUB Slack. If you have questions specific to you, write a direct Message to Amy or the TA in DUB Slack.

 Student and Instructor Expectations

Here is how I expect you to behave in this class:

• Respect each other's humanity. We all have lives, struggles, fears, and goals. You're more than a student, I'm more than a professor, your TAs are more than TAs, and your classmates more more than classmates. Start every conversation remembering that.
• Respect each other's differences. We all bring different knowledge, difference experiences, and different identities to class. Don't make assumptions about these things; assume we're different, embrace those differences, and learn from them.
• Focus on learning, not grades. Having knowledge and skills is what gets you into majors, internships, jobs, and graduate school. Grades are imprecise, narrow measures of what you know and can do, so if you optimize for them instead of skills, you'll end up with narrow knowledge and skills.
• Be demanding. I want this course to be great. If you don't like how it's going, give me feedback. The only way I can make it better is if you tell me what's wrong.
• Be skeptical. If you don't believe something I say, demand evidence or a better argument. If you hear about some exciting new technology, probe closely to understand it's true merits.
• Be constructive. Don't just critique ideas; use your knowledge of their limitations to make them better. This is especially important when you collaborate with other people.
• Don't deceive. Tell the truth, even it's hard to share. You didn't do your homework? Admit it, and let's find a way for you get future assignments done on time. You don't understand something? Admit it, and let's help you understand it. You don't want to learn something? Admit, and let's find a way to make it more interesting to you.
• Advocate for inclusion. If you see a classmate struggling with something in the class (e.g., an inaccessible resource, a confusing concept), assume that it's my fault for failing to teach something well, and let me know. I want to help.
• Do not plagiarize, as that puts grades before learning and deceives. If you commit any of the following forms of plagiarism in this class, I will use my discretion to either give you no credit for an assignment or in some cases, for the entire class.
  • Copying content you did not author and presenting it as your own.
  • Copying content and tweaking it to seem like your own, even though it is the same ideas.
  • Reusing content you wrote previously, but presenting it as original.
  • Citing sources as evidence, even when those sources do not present such evidence.
  • Copying someone's answer on a test rather than arriving at the answer yourself.
  • Violating copyright law by reusing content without complying with the license on that content.

  Assignments

Project

The homeworks will help you practice two key skills in interaction design, user experience research, and front-end engineering: analyzing and communicating design opportunities. You'll do this over the course of several homeworks:

• Project, part 1 (5 points): Discovering discoveries
• Project, part 2 (5 points): Extracting insights
• Project, part 3 (5 points): Analyzing interactions
• Project, part 4 (5 points): Assessing maturity
• Project, part 5 (5 points): Assessing expressiveness
• Project, part 6 (27 points): Specifying interaction

Think of the last assignment as the final summative assessment of what you've learned throughout the quarter, applied to a design task. 

We will grade assignments no later than 7 days after they are submitted (sometimes sooner). You can resubmit any assignment for a regrade based on our feedback, up until Monday 5pm of finals week.

Readings

There are two types of reading due before before each class: required and selected.

Required readings from the book (Links to an external site.). These readings and the required reading critiques will help you read closely and help you reflect on your understanding of key concepts.

• Before each class, submit a critique of the chapter to Canvas for credit, describing one substantial thing you would improve about the chapter and why. This might be ideas for content to add, explanations you think need to be improved, or ideas you still don't understand after having read it. Whatever you choose to critique, it should be sincere—don't make up a critique just because you're required to submit one. I will use your critiques to improve the book for future cohorts. If you like, you can also mention typos and other minor defects, but they will not count as substantial critiques.
• Required readings will be graded on a 0-1 scale; if you include a critique that demonstrates you read the chapter and offers a substantial critique, you get a 1. The TA will offer feedback if your critique doesn't quite meet the requirements above. You can always resubmit a critique for a regrade based on the TA's feedback.

Selected readings from a chapter's references. Choose one of the articles cited in the References list of the required chapter. If you want to choose one of your own readings, send Amy a message for approval; she might add it to the book. To access readings, you may need to use the UW Libraries Proxy, which helps you access digital library content from off campus.

Once you've found a paper that looks interesting, read it. Here are some pointers on how to read research papers effectively:

• Don't read the paper from end to end. Instead, think of the paper as an archive of everything needed to replicate the discovery. Your job is to find the parts of the archive that communicate the idea.
• Start with the abstract and introduction. They will usually give an overview of why the research was done and what was discovered or invented.
• After reading the overview, search for a section that describes the main idea. For tools that contribute a new invention, this might be labeled as a "Scenario". Follow the description of the scenario and any supporting figures to understand what the innovation is.
• After you understand the innovation, try to understand how it works. You might find this under an "Implementation" section. Don't worry about understanding every detail; there are usually just a few key insights that make the innovation work. That's what you're looking for.
• If you're skeptical about its value, read the evaluation, if there is one. There will be many details about how it was conducted, usually labeled "Method"; you can skip to the main results to see what the evaluation found. If you're skeptical about the results, read the method to see how they are arrived at, and whether you trust them.

Reading a paper using the strategy should take less than 30 minutes. Reading it in complete detail might take more than 1 hour, and that's rarely necessary if you're just trying to extract it's key ideas and insights.

After you're done reading, summarize the the paper into a Canvas text submission containing the following four elements:

• A citation to which article you read, copied from the chapter's reference list
• A single sentence that accurately and succinctly describe the main idea in the paper
• A single sentence that describes your personal reaction to the idea
• A single sentence that speculates what impact you believe the idea might have on society, or summarizes what impact the idea had on society

For example, if I were summarizing an article on Englebart's invention of the mouse, I might submit something like this:

Englebart, D. (1968). The mouse: A pointing device for all. The Fictional HCI Journal.

This paper described a new pointing device called a "mouse" that maps the movement of a physical device on a flat surface onto the movement of a virtual on-screen cursor. The idea made me realize that input devices can greatly determine what types of interfaces are possible; for example, the idea of pointing has shaped nearly everything in graphical user interfaces. The invention of the mouse has led many people sitting in front of flat surfaces staring at screens pointing at virtual things, while also excluding those who cannot use a mouse from accessing much of the software and content in the world.

The summarization skill above is an authentic one; you'll regularly be asked to summarize what you learned about some new invention to many groups, such as coworkers, managers, and audiences on social media. To help you practice this, we'll grade this skill using standards-based mastery grading. The rubric for this is essentially a checklist:

• The summary conveys the main idea of the paper.
• The summary is concise; it couldn't be shorter without losing meaning.
• The summary is clear; most audiences would likely understand it without having to reread it.
• The summary is insightful; it teaches more than what the paper itself teaches.

Each time you submit a summary, the TA will give you detailed feedback on how well you met each standard, to help you improve your summarization skills. As with the required readings, you can always resubmit a revised summary for a regrade.

  Grading

Grading Philosophy

I'm a strong believer that one of the only benefits of grades is to motivate unmotivated students to learn. Otherwise, I view grades as mostly harmful to learning: they cause students to obsess over optimizing a narrow measurement of their knowledge, rather than the much broader knowledge that might matter. Because this is a graduate course, and you're here to learn, I want you to therefore think of the points in this class as just an accounting of the learning you've done and a record of what you have left to learn. But there's no need to worry: no employer cares about your grade in this class, they care about what you know and what you can do. I encourage you to think of the grading system as a game: use it to motivate yourself extrinsically if you're having trouble motivating yourself intrinsically.

Grading System

To keep the grading scheme from distracting you too much, the grading in this class is simple. There are 100 points you can earn, each reflecting your ability to read and synthesize technical ideas about interface implementation and design:

• Required readings (1 each, 18 possible, 16 graded)
• Selected readings (2 each, 36 possible, 32 graded)
• Project parts (6 assignments, 52 possible, 52 graded)

Note the extra readings above, which allow for up to 6 points of extra credit.

I'll map your 100 points according to the grading scale in Canvas.

Late Submissions and Regrades

There is no penalty for late work submitted before Monday 5pm of finals week. As a courtesy, if you know you're going to be late, notify the TA and they will make a note while they're grading. (There is no penalty for not letting them know—sometimes there are emergencies). Try to hit the deadlines so work doesn't pile up and you can make the most of our time together in class.

As noted above, all readings and project submissions can be submitted for regrade as many times as you like. Because there is no penalty for late work, do your best work and then submit, even if it is after the deadline. If you're unsure if your work is ready, come to office hours for feedback, or find us during class for feedback.

Note: the flexibility of the policies above means that there's a greater burden on your to self-regulate your learning. If you know you have trouble with that, do your best to meet all deadlines so the quarter's work doesn't pile up.

  Resources

Student Resources
A number of challenges from a variety of directions can affect your ability to bring your optimal attention and energy to a course. Student Resources is a set of links to campus resources that UW makes available to students in trying to mitigate and cope with some of these challenges.

iSchool Technology Requirements
The iSchool has a set of technology requirements for both online and residential students. We highly recommend that students adhere to these standards which are updated annually. Students who do not meet these standards may experience technology problems throughout the course.

iSchool Learning Technologies Support Site
Knowledge base for Canvas, VoiceThread, Zoom, and other learning technologies tools.

UW Libraries
In this course you may be required to access a large number of databases through the Internet. Several of these databases are publicly available, but some are proprietary and access requires authentication through the UW Libraries. Information about logging in to use these databases is available on the Connecting to the Libraries page.

 Religious Accommodation

Washington state law requires that UW develop a policy for accommodation of student absences or significant hardship due to reasons of faith or conscience, or for organized religious activities. The UW’s policy, including more information about how to request an accommodation, is available at Religious Accommodations Policy. Accommodations must be requested within the first two weeks of this course using the Religious Accommodations Request form.