Course Details

This course covers the fundamentals of UX design and provides the students with insights into the "real-life" processes, challengers, considerations, tools, teams, models, etc. of a user experience designer. Students will be introduced to the UX principles, to designing, evaluating, implementing and measuring of UX.


Additional Readings:

Week 2:
Usability Evaluation
A Cultural Constraint and the Definition of Awkward
What’s the waiter doing with the computer screen?
What is a browser?
Ozzy and remote control
How to Conduct User Observations
Contextual Inquiry
Kathy Sierra: Building the minimum Badass User, Business of Software 2012
Kathy Sierra – Building badass users
How Google Failed Its Users and Gave Birth to an Internet Meme
These are your users... read and be horrified

Week 3:
Personas and user-centered design: How can personas benefit product design processes?
Creative Problem Solving with SCAMPER
The Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction, 2nd Ed.
Handling the Competing Demands of Field Studies
Goal-Directed Design: An Interview with Kim Goodwin

Week 4:
Usability Inspection Methods
Are we overlooking some usability testing methods? A comparison of lab, beta, and forum tests
Usability testing of mobile applications: A comparison between laboratory and field testing
Methods to support human-centred design
Methods for testing and evaluating survey questions
A Comparison of Three Usability Evaluation Methods: Heuristic, Think-Aloud, and Performance Testing

Week 5:
User Stories
10 Tips for writing good user stories
Handbook of Usability Testing

Week 6:
User Experience and Experience Design
Measuring usability as quality of use
Methods for Measuring Usability
SUS - A quick and dirty usability scale
SUS: A Retrospective
Assessing The Validity Of Your Research
Visualizing Fitts’s Law
Fitts' Law and Infinite Width
Digital services playbook

Week 7:
Latch: The Five Ultimate Hatracks
LATCH – Methods of Organization
Information Architecture
Latch Principles Explained
UX Online Card Sort Example
Analyzing Card Sort Results with a Spreadsheet Template
Remote Unmoderated Card Sorts: For Free!
Card Sorting Encyclopedia Entry

Week 11:
Drop-Down Usability: When You Should (and Shouldn’t) Use Them
Redesigning The Country Selector
Designing More Efficient Forms: Assistance and Validation
Where’s the Search? Re-examining User Expectations of Web Objects
“Label Placement in Forms” by Matteo Penzo

Week 12:
Usability Testers Manual
Prototyping tools
Paper Prototyping As A Usability Testing Technique
Usability Testing With Prototypes
Hanmail paper prototyping video