Course Overview

User-centered Design Principles

  • Early focus on users
  • Empirical evaluation
  • Iterative design

User-centered Design Goals

  • Utility --- provides functions users need or want
  • Learnability --- users can figure out how to successfully complete task
  • Efficiency --- task completion time
  • User satisfaction --- users indicate that they are satisfied with product

User-centered Design Methods

  • Interviews and contextual inquiry
  • Persona creation and application
  • Information architecture with card sorting
  • Process structure design using storyboarding and flow diagrams
  • Wireframing / Prototyping
  • Evaluation methods, particularly usability testing

Architecture Principles

  • Event-driven programming
  • Separation of document structure (HTML), formatting (CSS) and interaction control (JS)
  • Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework --- separation of data organization, interaction logic, and presentation
  • CSS grids/frameworks and responsive design