Tutorial 16

Teaching User Interface Development to Software Engineers

Gary Perlman, Ohio State University

Monday Morning, May 8

Objective

Through this tutorial, participants will (1) develop realistic expectations of what can be taught, at what cost, to what benefit, in what period, and to whom, (2) learn about resource materials for teaching user interface development, and (3) get help designing course materials on user interface development for practically-oriented industrial and academic students.

Content

This tutorial is organized around the curriculum module developed by the instructor for the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. The tutorial stresses the content of a first course to be offered to computer science majors and software engineers. This content focuses on an iterative development lifecycle of practical, cost-effective methods for the analysis, design,implementation, and evaluation of user interfaces. Widely available and economical Macintosh and PC hardware and software is discussed, with some references to common workstation environments.

Audience

This intermediate-level tutorial assumes some general knowledge of the HCI field, although audiences at different levels can benefit. The intended audience includes educators who want to integrate user interface development into their software engineering courses or who want to teach material on user interface development; industrial user interface and human factors specialists who wish to disseminate their expertise throughout organizations by presenting tutorials on selected topics; and managers who want to increase awareness of what can and should be common knowledge on user interface development in software development environments.

Presentation

Lecture, video

Instructor

Gary Perlman has held teaching and/or research positions at the University of California in San Diego, AT&T; Bell Laboratories, the Wang Institute, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, and Ohio State University. He is well known as the author of statistical and hypertext software used extensively for user interface evaluation. He is the creator of the HCI Bibliography project, the largest free-access bibliography on HCI. Professor Perlman has served on the ACM/SIGCHI curriculum development group and from 1991 to 1994 was the ACM/SIGCHI education chair.

Keith Instone / instone@acm.org / 95-01-05