Article

Term project user interface specifications in a usability engineering course: challenges and suggestions

Authors:

L. M. Leventhal,

J. Barnes,

J. ChaoAuthors Info & Claims

SIGCSE '04: Proceedings of the 35th SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education

Pages 41 - 45

https://doi.org/10.1145/971300.971316

Published: 01 March 2004 Publication History

Get Access

Abstract

Term projects in an undergraduate Usability Engineering (UE) course provide opportunities for students to put the abstract ideas of what they have learned in class into practice. Projects provide students with opportunities to learn that the process of usability engineering is rarely as smooth as it would seem in the abstract. Moreover, term projects give students the opportunity to learn about specific methodologies and notations.One critical phase of the term project is the user interface specification; in our undergraduate UE course we have found the specification phase to be a significant pedagogic challenge. Key elements to that challenge are: 1) Presenting the project requirements in such a way that the students can generate a specification, 2) Defining the form and format for student work, 3) Teaching the process of specification and 4) Assessing the students' work. In this paper, we describe our approach to each of these four challenges. Since 1996, we have had good success with our approach; however, student data suggests that students still find the UE specification process difficult. In Spring 2003, we added some extra steps in our process that seem to lead to greater student understanding and success.

References

[1]

Barnes, J. and Leventhal, L. Turning the Tables: Introducing Software Engineering Concepts in a User Interface Design Course in Proceedings of SIGCSE 2001 (February 2001), ACM Press, 214--218.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[2]

Hix, D. and Hartson, H.R. Developing User Interfaces: Ensuring Usability through Product & Process. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, 1993.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[3]

Jacobson, I., Booch, G., and Rumbaugh, J. The Unified Software Development Process. Addison-Wesley, Boston, 1999.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[4]

Lazar, J., Gasen, J., Preece, J. and Winograd, T. New Issues in Teaching HCI: Pinning a Tail on a Moving Donkey in Extended Abstracts of CHI 2002 (April 2002), ACM Press, 696--697.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[5]

Leventhal, L. and Barnes, J. Two for One: Squeezing Human-Computer Interaction and Software Engineering into a Core Computer Science Course. Computer Science Education. 13(3), 177--190.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[6]

Mayhew, D.J. The Usability Engineering Lifecycle - A Practitioner's Handbook for User Interface Design. Morgan Kaufman Publishers, San Francisco, 1999.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[7]

Preece, J., Rogers, Y. and Sharp, H. Interaction Design. John Wiley & Sons. New York, 2001.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[8]

Rosson, M.B. and Carroll, J.M. Usability Engineering: Scenario-Based Development of Human-Computer Interaction. Morgan Kaufman Publishers, San Francisco, 2002.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[9]

The Joint Task Force on Computing Curricula, IEEE Computer Society and Association of Computing Machinery. Computing Curricula 2001, Computer Science. Final Report 15 December 2001. http://www.computer.org/education/cc2001/final/index.htm.

Google Scholar

Cited By

View all

Bim SLeitão Cde Souza CMaciel Cde Souza PAnacleto Jde Almeida Neris V(2012)Can the teaching of HCI contribute for the learning of computer science the case of semiotic engineering methodsProceedings of the 11th Brazilian Symposium on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.5555/2393536.2393564(185-194)Online publication date: 5-Nov-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/2393536.2393564
Poor GLeventhal LBarnes JHutchings DAlbee PCampbell L(2012)No User Left BehindACM Transactions on Computing Education10.1145/2160547.216054812:2(1-22)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2160547.2160548
Koppelman Hvan Dijk BDavoli RGoldweber MSalomoni P(2006)Creating a realistic context for team projects in HCIProceedings of the 11th annual SIGCSE conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education10.1145/1140124.1140142(58-62)Online publication date: 26-Jun-2006
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1140124.1140142
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Term project user interface specifications in a usability engineering course: challenges and suggestions
1. Human-centered computing
  1. Human computer interaction (HCI)
    1. HCI design and evaluation methods
  2. Interaction design
    1. Interaction design process and methods
      1. User centered design

Recommendations

Term project user interface specifications in a usability engineering course: challenges and suggestions

Term projects in an undergraduate Usability Engineering (UE) course provide opportunities for students to put the abstract ideas of what they have learned in class into practice. Projects provide students with opportunities to learn that the process of ...
A Dialog-Oriented User Interface Generation Mechanism
APSEC '96: Proceedings of the Third Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference

Nowadays, for GUI application development, there are a number of interface builders, which make it possible for the user to create user interfaces easily, and UIMSs, which help to specify and design user interfaces. However, interface builders lack the ...
User-process model approach to improve user interface usability: Book Reviews

Our purpose in this study is to inductively reorganize software interface menu items based on a user's process model. The proposed menu interface in this study used direct users' input, such as goals and strategies for solving their information needs, ...

Comments

Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

SIGCSE '04: Proceedings of the 35th SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education

March 2004

544 pages

ISBN:1581137982

DOI:10.1145/971300

Conference Chairs:
Dan Joyce
Villanova University
,
Deborah Knox
The College of New Jersey
,
Program Chairs:
Wanda Dann
Ithaca College
,
Tom Naps
University of Wisconsin - Oshkosh

ACM SIGCSE Bulletin Volume 36, Issue 1
March 2004
501 pages
ISSN:0097-8418
DOI:10.1145/1028174
Issue’s Table of Contents

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 01 March 2004

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Article

Conference

SIGCSE04

Sponsor:

SIGCSE04: Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education 2004

March 3 - 7, 2004

Virginia, Norfolk, USA

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 1,595 of 4,542 submissions, 35%

Upcoming Conference

SIGCSE Virtual 2024

Sponsor:
sigcse

1st ACM Virtual Global Computing Education Conference

December 5 - 8, 2024

Virtual Event , NC , USA

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

7
Total Citations
View Citations
553
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)5
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0

Reflects downloads up to 26 Sep 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all

Bim SLeitão Cde Souza CMaciel Cde Souza PAnacleto Jde Almeida Neris V(2012)Can the teaching of HCI contribute for the learning of computer science the case of semiotic engineering methodsProceedings of the 11th Brazilian Symposium on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.5555/2393536.2393564(185-194)Online publication date: 5-Nov-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/2393536.2393564
Poor GLeventhal LBarnes JHutchings DAlbee PCampbell L(2012)No User Left BehindACM Transactions on Computing Education10.1145/2160547.216054812:2(1-22)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2160547.2160548
Koppelman Hvan Dijk BDavoli RGoldweber MSalomoni P(2006)Creating a realistic context for team projects in HCIProceedings of the 11th annual SIGCSE conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education10.1145/1140124.1140142(58-62)Online publication date: 26-Jun-2006
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1140124.1140142
Koppelman Hvan Dijk B(2006)Creating a realistic context for team projects in HCIACM SIGCSE Bulletin10.1145/1140123.114014238:3(58-62)Online publication date: 26-Jun-2006
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1140123.1140142
Wright TNoble JMarshall S(2005)Using a system of tutorials and groups to increase feedback and teach user interface designProceedings of the 7th Australasian conference on Computing education - Volume 4210.5555/1082424.1082448(187-192)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2005
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/1082424.1082448
Pastel RDann WNaps TTymann PBaldwin D(2005)Integrating science and research in a HCI design courseProceedings of the 36th SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education10.1145/1047344.1047371(31-35)Online publication date: 23-Feb-2005
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1047344.1047371
Pastel R(2005)Integrating science and research in a HCI design courseACM SIGCSE Bulletin10.1145/1047124.104737137:1(31-35)Online publication date: 23-Feb-2005
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1047124.1047371

View Options

Get Access

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Cited By

Index Terms

Recommendations

Term project user interface specifications in a usability engineering course: challenges and suggestions

A Dialog-Oriented User Interface Generation Mechanism

User-process model approach to improve user interface usability: Book Reviews