Welcome to CS124/CS182
What is the difference between CS124/CS182?
Since this is the question I get most often, I'll answer it first.
CS182: Basics of User Interface Design is a 4.5 week crash course in UI design. It teaches students the bare bones of UI design, and is intented for non-CS majors who have interest in UI design, but are not as interested in exploring different styles of interfaces in depth. It is worth 1 unit and does not count for CS elective credit.
CS124: (Non traditional) User Interface Design is a 14-week course intended for CS majors that explores UI design in more detail. In particular, as computers move off of the desktop, interfaces are moving away from the traditional windows, icon, menu, pointer (WIMP) paradigm. In addition to considering the basics of traditional UI design, this class will examine the technological and usability issues in constructing non-traditional (i.e. non-WIMP) interfaces. Styles of interfaces we will examine may include speech and natural language-based interfaces, tangible interfaces, vision-based interfaces, and pen-based interfaces. For each class of interface, we will address the degree to which the interface must rely on recognition or artificial intelligence, and the specific advantages, disadvantages and challenges this "intelligence" introduces. CS124 is worth 3 units and counts for CS elective credit.
You may not receive credit for both CS124 and CS182.Course Aims and Objectives
- Aim 1 (CS124/CS182): To give students a basic understanding of traditional user interface (UI) development principles Objectives:
- Identify the major components of UI design
- Describe and apply the principal UI design techniques
- Aim 2 (CS124): To familiarize students with a broad range of non-WIMP UI paradigms and to examine how traditional principles apply (or do not apply) to these new paradigms Objectives:
- Identify the major technical and UI challenges for a number of different UI paradigms
- Describe how traditional UI design techniques do and do not apply to new kinds of interfaces
- Describe how technological challenges and interface goals often work against one another
- Aim 3 (CS124): To give students an appreciation
for the advantages and disadvantages of incorporating intelligence into
user interface design
Objectives: - Identify situations in which intelligence improves usability and situations in which it detracts from it
- Evaluate how system error affects usability
- Explore human perception of machine intelligence
- Aim 4 (CS124): To teach students to think,
speak and write critically about these new interfaces styles from both
a technological and user interface perspective
Objectives:- Critically respond to a research paper
- Identify key points for discussion from a research paper
- Organize and lead class discussion
- Manage more than one project and/or paper simultaneously