Computer Science › Specialization
HCI as a discipline: users, tasks, and context of use, why the interface is the system from the user's point of view, and how this differs from visual design alone.
Attention, memory limits, and Gestalt grouping, and what they imply for layout, feedback, and how much an interface may ask a person to remember.
Mental models and the gulfs of execution and evaluation, with affordances, signifiers, mapping, and feedback as the tools that close them.
Two predictive models: Fitts's law for pointing time and Hick's law for choice time, with worked calculations on real target sizes and menus, and where each one stops applying.
The ISO 9241-11 definition of usability: effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction for specified users, goals, and context, and how that makes usability measurable.
Nielsen's ten heuristics and how to run a heuristic evaluation, including severity ratings and how many evaluators it takes.
Planning a usability test, think-aloud, task success and time, and scoring the System Usability Scale correctly.
Interviews and contextual inquiry, personas grounded in evidence instead of invention, and hierarchical task analysis.
Sketch, wireframe, mockup, and prototype: the question each fidelity answers and the cost of testing at the wrong one.
Navigation patterns, menus, windows and dialogs, and the information architecture methods behind them, such as card sorting and tree testing.
Labels, input types, defaults, validation timing, and error messages, for forms people actually finish.
Color contrast and color vision, typographic hierarchy and legibility, and when an icon needs a label.
Semiotic engineering: the interface as a message from designer to user, and the communicability evaluation method with its breakdown tags.
WCAG's four principles and conformance levels, semantic markup, keyboard access, and testing with assistive technology, against the current published version of the standard.
Internationalization versus localization, text expansion, right-to-left layout, and date, number, and plural rules through Unicode CLDR and ICU.
Weiser's vision of ubiquitous computing and post-WIMP interaction through touch, voice, gesture, and context awareness, with what held up and what did not.
Cleveland and McGill's ranking of perceptual encodings, preattentive features, and choosing a chart by the comparison it has to support.
One real interface evaluated across the whole discipline: task analysis, heuristic evaluation, a small usability test scored with SUS, a WCAG check, and a prioritized list of findings.
Part of the Computer Science curriculum.
HCI as a discipline: users, tasks, and context of use, why the interface is the system from the user's point of view, and how this differs from visual design alone.
Attention, memory limits, and Gestalt grouping, and what they imply for layout, feedback, and how much an interface may ask a person to remember.
Mental models and the gulfs of execution and evaluation, with affordances, signifiers, mapping, and feedback as the tools that close them.
Two predictive models: Fitts's law for pointing time and Hick's law for choice time, with worked calculations on real target sizes and menus, and where each one stops applying.
The ISO 9241-11 definition of usability: effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction for specified users, goals, and context, and how that makes usability measurable.
Nielsen's ten heuristics and how to run a heuristic evaluation, including severity ratings and how many evaluators it takes.
Planning a usability test, think-aloud, task success and time, and scoring the System Usability Scale correctly.
Interviews and contextual inquiry, personas grounded in evidence instead of invention, and hierarchical task analysis.
Sketch, wireframe, mockup, and prototype: the question each fidelity answers and the cost of testing at the wrong one.
Navigation patterns, menus, windows and dialogs, and the information architecture methods behind them, such as card sorting and tree testing.
Labels, input types, defaults, validation timing, and error messages, for forms people actually finish.
Color contrast and color vision, typographic hierarchy and legibility, and when an icon needs a label.
Semiotic engineering: the interface as a message from designer to user, and the communicability evaluation method with its breakdown tags.
WCAG's four principles and conformance levels, semantic markup, keyboard access, and testing with assistive technology, against the current published version of the standard.
Internationalization versus localization, text expansion, right-to-left layout, and date, number, and plural rules through Unicode CLDR and ICU.
Weiser's vision of ubiquitous computing and post-WIMP interaction through touch, voice, gesture, and context awareness, with what held up and what did not.
Cleveland and McGill's ranking of perceptual encodings, preattentive features, and choosing a chart by the comparison it has to support.
One real interface evaluated across the whole discipline: task analysis, heuristic evaluation, a small usability test scored with SUS, a WCAG check, and a prioritized list of findings.