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APPD 1001

User Interface Design and Development

30 credit-hours

The title of this course is somewhat ambitious relative to what we actually did. It was a new course and it was apparent that not quite all of the ducks were lined up in a row.

We began the course with a series of "This is Broken" submissions meant to highlight frustrating (or exemplary, as "This is Working Super Well") user experiences.

We gave one sumbission per week for 6-7 weeks (depending on which section of the course you were in; my section didn't meet during the first week of January, so I think we only did six submissions), and as we went along, I posted the best four on my blog:

• This Isn't Really Working For Me
• 1: The Microwave
• 2: Tim Hortons Wastebin
• 3: Faucets
• 4: Highway 102 (and sequential exit numbering)
• or, read all of the posts on a single page

We did eventually get around to making small pieces of user-interfaces (like a video player mockup and a form in Flash like this one). But for wow-please-look-at-this purposes, I'll show you something I made for the purpose of teaching somebody how to do something. At the end of it, I distributed worksheets. (Separate "before" and "after" tests would have been useful, but there really wasn't enough time for this level of efficacy-checking. My subjects said it was useful, but I might have just charmed them with my winning personality. j/k)