Syllabus
IDCC: User Interface Design
Roland Hübscher
Information Design & Corporate Communication, Bentley University
August , 

Simple Things First
If you send me an email message, please put somewhere in the subject line the text “IDCC” and make
sure it has all the proper information in it. Note the “Important links” page in the table below. You are
expected to regularly check it for reading assignments. This page contains most of the links mentioned in
class so that you can reach these pages more easily.
Professor
Class time
Class location
Office
Office hours
Email
Home page
Important links

Roland Hübscher
Tuesday & Thursday :–: p.m.
Smith 
Adamian 
Tuesday & Thursday :–: p.m. and by appointment
rhubscher@bentley.edu
http://rolandhubscher.org
http://rolandhubscher.org/courses/idcc/
Course Description
Everything we interact with has a user interface, from newspapers and grocery stores to cell phones and web
sites. Designing such a user interface is an important and difficult process, which we will learn and practice
with hands-on activities. Understanding how to approach a design problem also helps doing research
for almost any ill-defined problem as real-world problems often are. More concretely, you will learn and
practice, among other things, how to brainstorm, do a contextual inquiry, iteratively approach an ill-defined
problem, come up with and evaluate alternative solutions, and build models.
This course does not specifically focus on computer interfaces, or interfaces in general. The focus is on
approaching messy and ill-defined problems based with the design process.

Learning Goals and Objectives
. Learning Goals
The students will be competent problem solvers of ill-defined real-world problems.


. Learning Objectives
• Appreciate the difficulty and importance of user-centered design.
• Understand design process, design activities, guidelines, user-centered design and evaluation methods.
• Articulate clearly what the users need to accomplish their task.
• Apply design process and activities to design and build different kinds of prototypes and to solve
ill-defined problems.
• Use guidelines to design and evaluate solutions to design problems.

Texts
You need to order this book in the first week. The university bookstore is not able to get it for us. We will be
using Design Thinking Pocket Guide by Robert A. Curedale which is available on the web in paperback, e.g.,
from Amazon at http://www.amazon.com/Design-Thinking-Pocket-Robert-Curedale/dp/X.
But always remember to check on http://texts.com where the best book deals are. Additional readings
will be assigned from the web and as PDF files.

Team Work
In this class, you will do some individual work (quizzes, small design project(s)) and a group project.
Individual work means that you work on your own, do your own research, come up with your own solution,
describe it yourself, etc. You may discuss the problem statement but not the solution with other students.
Of course, while you are doing your research, you will have to talk to other students—but avoid students in
this class for this purpose.
When you are doing the group project, you have to discuss all the decisions and research in your group.
It’s important that all group members do understand everything about your project. Of course, you need to
split up the work, but you need to report back to the group regularly and make sure everybody in the group
is on the same page, understands the project and its solutions and agrees with all decisions.
Finally, readings should be considered a starting point for discussion. Don’t just wait until class to
discuss what you have read, what you may not understand, disagree with, or find useful.
Plagiarism in anything that you will write up is obviously unacceptable and will be dealt with accordingly.
. Bentley Honor Code
The Bentley University Honor Code formally recognizes the responsibility of students to act in an ethical
manner. It expects all students to maintain academic honesty in their own work, recognizing that most
students will maintain academic honesty because of their own high standards. The honor code expects
students to promote ethical behavior throughout the Bentley community and to take responsible action
when there is a reason to suspect dishonesty.
In addition, the honor code encourages faculty members to foster an atmosphere of mutual trust and
respect in and out of the classroom. Faculty are also expected to share the responsibility of maintaining an
academically honest environment.
The honor code is not meant to be a cure for all occurrences of academic dishonesty. It does not seek to
create a community of informers. Rather, the honor code depends upon the good will to care enough for a
friend or a fellow student, even a stranger, to warn the individual to abandon dishonesty for the individual’s
own sake and that of the community. Thus, the honor code asks all students to share the responsibility of
maintaining an honest environment.
The students of Bentley University, in a spirit of mutual trust and fellowship, aware of the values of
a true education and the challenge posed by the world, do hereby pledge to accept the responsibility for
honorable conduct in all academic activities, to assist one another in maintaining and promoting personal

integrity, to abide by the principles set forth in the honor code, and to follow the procedures and observe the
policies set forth in the academic integrity system.

Quizzes and Exams
There will be no midterm or final exam. However, there will be several (five plus or minus a couple)
announced and unannounced quizzes testing the readings and the understanding of the design activities.

Lecture Organization
Classes will be a combination of:
• Discussion of the readings
• Doing some of the design activities in class and as homework
• Discussion of the latest findings and experiences while working on the design group project

Design Exercises
There will be an initial - to -week warm-up design project in pairs followed by a large group project and a
final individual project in lieu of a final exam.
. Small Warm-Up Project
Before the students learn about design, they will design an interface to a relatively small device to get
their feet wet and hands dirty. The prototypes will be sketches only and the students will do several quick
iterations. Part of the design activity will be in class to get immediate feedback.
. Group Project
Students will work in groups of  to  members on a major design project. The topic will be assigned by the
instructor and will be the same for all groups.
The students will design an interface of a non-trivial device (but not of some web site or other software
product). Throughout a large part of the semester, students will develop a much more complete understanding of what activities are involved in design during in-class discussions and activities and out-of-class
experiences.
The students will go through the whole design process including brainstorming (to get started), doing
the necessary research in the field to come up with a good analysis, usability criteria, brainstorming for
conceptual models and prototypes, and then iteration mainly on analysis, prototypes (including model
building) and evaluation.
Early prototypes will be on paper, sketched. Later and especially the final prototype will be much more
hi-def where and, where it makes sense, in D with any material students want to use including Lego, clay,
playdough, cardboard, modeling foam, virtual modeling or a combination of all these materials.
Students will keep a design diary and will produce a final brochure that could be submitted to the
customer. The design diary is a record of all their activities, insights, assumptions, design decisions, etc.
The group will also create a very clean, relatively short ( to  pages) write-up for the brochure including
pictures of their D model put into the appropriate context (so it looks kind of real).
To summarize, the students produce the following items:
. A design diary which is complete but not necessarily pretty.
. A prototype (in D where reasonable).

. A summary of the most import information about the solution.
. A one-page brochure.
At the end of the class, the students will discuss their design in a professional-quality presentation.
. Individual Final Project
The students will again design an interface to a relatively small interface and create a brochure as in the
group project. This design will be done by the students completely on their own outside the classroom. Any
material can be used for the prototype (from sketches to D).

Grading
Since this is a project-based class, projects play a major role in the evaluation of the students as well.
Class participation
Quizzes
Projects
25%
25%
50%
Participation can earn you a total of  out of the total  points and is evaluated as follows. Note that
just showing up to class is not the same as participating.
 points Student participates regularly in class with relevant comments, questions and answers. The
student is prepared when coming to class. (The way it should be.)
 points Student participates once in a while and is most of the time reasonably well prepared. It is not
just the quantity of participation that matters but also the quality. (Mediocre but not really bad.)
 points
Student barely participates in class and is often unprepared to answer questions. (Pretty useless.)
There are two individual projects and one group project weighted as follows.
Individual warm-up project
Individual final project
Group project
20%
30%
50%
The group project itself is graded as shown below. Group members will also evaluate each other at the
end of the project. This will be used to adjust your individual project grade. Design activities (process) will
be evaluated throughout the semester.
Design activities (process)
Design diary
Final presentation
Final brochure
Final design
30%
20%
10%
15%
25%
 Lecture Topics
The topics are organized around the design process. Thus, theory and the group project will run roughly
in parallel so that whatever activity comes next in the design process, it will be discussed just before the
students need to apply it. The dates are approximate, only.

Week : Introduction to design
What is design and what makes it so difficult? How is it different from engineering and other problem-solving
approaches?
Reading
Design Thinking Pocket Guide: Chapter 
Week : Design process
Designing consists of an iterative sequence of activities. What activities should be included and in what
order?
Reading
Design Thinking Pocket Guide: Chapter 
Week : Keeping an open mind
Design tackles so-called wicked problems: we initially don’t understand neither the problem nor the
potential solutions well. Therefore, it is important to use proper techniques to not get stuck on the first
“obvious” idea. Methods include brainstorming and sketching.
Reading
Design Thinking Pocket Guide: Chapter 
Week : Contextual enquiry
Understanding a problem requires us to often collect real data by observation, interviews, etc.
Reading
Design Thinking Pocket Guide: Chapter 
Week : Scenarios, user, task and context analysis
The data needs to be carefully categorized and analyzed and will be an important resource in the design
process.
Reading
Design Thinking Pocket Guide: Chapter 
Week : Usability (and other) criteria
Why is one design or prototype better than another or “good enough?” Without clearly stated criteria, it is
impossible to say.
Reading
Design Thinking Pocket Guide: Chapter 
Week : Resources, constraints and tradeoffs
We don’t have all the money, time, experts, etc. in the world. How should we trade the various resources off?
readingDesign Thinking Pocket Guide: Chapter 
Week : Conceptual modeling
How do people think about interfaces? How should they think about your interface? For instance, is a
telephone looking like a football a good interface?

Week : Usability guidelines
The design community has already a pretty good idea what are good designs and which ones don’t works so
well. (But look around you—many designers seem to have forgotten them.)
Week : Low- and high-fidelity prototypes
You need prototypes so you can make your designs more concrete, you can talk about them and compare
them. We will create simple prototypes as sketches on paper and fancier D models.
Week : Iteration in design
Iteration is essential to design and it needs to be practiced to be believed. We will do a couple of iterations
on our project as well.
Week : A sample of existing and future interfaces
It is important that designers are familiar with a wide variety of interfaces, their potential and constraints.
We’ll discuss interfaces from our daily lives and what went wrong (and right) with them. We will look
at interfaces that only exist in the lab at the moment and rely on new advances in computer and other
technology.
We will continue looking at interfaces including those that are adaptive, intelligent, wireless, wearable,
multimodal, etc. And we will also look at interfaces for people with disabilities, for elderly people and kids,
etc.
Week : Evaluation methods
We will especially look into formative evaluation methods that you can use during the design.
Week : Group presentations
Each group will describe their project in a professional-quality presentations.