User Interface Update 2004

OBJECTIVES, INTENDED AUDIENCE AND CRITERIA FOR ARTICLES

COURSE OBJECTIVES: These annual courses are designed to keep computer professionals up-to-date with the latest, most useful information concerning the design and development of high quality, professional user interfaces in computer systems. Each course is totally (100%) new each year!

At the end of this seminar, participants should:

• Be able to understand most of the recent advances in user interface, usability and user experience technology, particularly those that are of greatest interest to practitioners,
• Understand the contents of about 50 important research reports that were published in the past year or so, and
• Be able to state how the major research findings can be applied to improving the usability of computer systems, including Web-based systems and graphical user interfaces.

INTENDED AUDIENCE: The course is intended for computer professionals, including:

• User interface designers and developers
• Web designers and developers
• Developers and programmers
• Project managers
• Human factors and ergonomics specialists
• Systems analysts and systems engineers
• Documentation and training specialists
• Usability and user experience specialists
• Multimedia specialists

CRITERIA FOR SELECTING ARTICLES

• Articles that have evidence for stating: "Do this" or "Don't do that,"
• Articles that contain useful design and/or evaluation examples,
• Articles that successfully critique the current user interface development process,
• Articles that suggest improvements to the user interface development process,
• Articles that contain useful usability metrics, and
• Articles that provide helpful insights into system-related user characteristics.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

DAY 1

Unit 1 - General

• The value of user involvement: What does the research say?
• Personas: Setting the stage for building usable information sites
• ‘Human Factors' as a household name (exercise)
• The “usability fitness function”
• ISO 13407: Human Centered Design Processes for Interactive Systems
• Currently used usability methods (exercise)
• Integrating usability into ‘use cases'
• Results from a survey of web prototyping tools usage
• HTML wireframes and prototyping
• Which is best? Visio or HTML Wireframes
• Paper Prototyping - What is it good for?
• Applying ‘Six Sigma' concepts to usability

Unit 2 - Displays

• Using eye movements to understand user preferences when searching
• Designing emotionally evocative homepages
• What users want on e-commerce websites
• Using photos on e-commerce websites
• Evaluation of new multimedia formats for cancer communications
• Impact of multimedia presentation on knowledge acquisition

Unit 3 - Interaction Issues

• Research-based Web Design & Usability Guidelines
• The ten most violated homepage design guidelines
• Testing the ‘three-click' rule
• Breadcrumb navigation
• Web page layout: Left vs. right justified navigation menus
• Why scrollbars are on the right

Unit 4 - Input-Output Devices: What's new from Comdex?

DAY 2

Unit 5 - Research Review

• General issues
• Displays and interaction issues
• Website design issues
• Usability testing

Unit 6 - Users

• What is your working memory capacity? (exercise)
• Putting working memory to work
• Keying briefly presented multiple-digit numbers
• Age variations in immediate memory for multiple-digit numbers

Unit 7 - Usability Testing

• Determining the effectiveness of the usability problem inspector
• Changing analysts' tunes: An attempt to improve ‘heuristic evaluation'
• Effectiveness of usability evaluation and testing as a function of performance classification
• Tracking the effectiveness of usability evaluation methods
• Comparing heuristic evaluation and performance testing: A case study
• How good are heuristic evaluations and expert reviews?
• Don't test users, test hypotheses
• Comparing concurrent vs. retrospective verbalizing in usability tests
• Common Industry Format (CIF) for test reports

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