This course will provide an introduction to the field of Human Computer Interaction and will introduce students to behavioural research methods and techniques used in usability testing. The course will give students the essential theoretical background to approaches, methods and techniques followed by practical experience in conducting usability studies for interactive systems.

Upon completion of this course, the student will be able to:

• Appreciate the importance of the user interface in software development.
• Understand key aspects of human psychology which can determine user actions at and satisfaction of the interface.  
• Describe  the key design principles for user interfaces. 
• Set up and carry out a process to gather requirements for, engage in iterative design of, and evaluate the usability of a user interface. 
• Describe how user interface development can be integrated into an overall software development process. 
• Understand sufficient theory of human computer interaction, experimental methodology and inferential statistics to engage with the contemporary research literature in interface technology and design.  
• Identify key design errors in simple interfaces and suggest alternative designs. 
• Discuss ethical issues involved in testing user interfaces.

Group project Stage 1 (15%);
Group project Stage 2 (20%);
Group project Stage 3 (10%);
Group project Stage 4 (5%);
Final exam (50%)

Two two-hour lecture blocks each week and a group assignment

COMP1110 or COMP2750; and a further 12 units of COMP 2000-series courses.

Norman, Donald The Design of Everyday Things London/New York: MIT Press, 2000. (Required reading)

"Brick" for COMP3900/6390 (purchase from Computer Science Reception, Level 3, CS&IT building between 9am and 11am weekdays)

A list of other reference books will be given at the start of the course.

Course page https://cecs.anu.edu.au/studentdb/courses/students/csg_student.cgi?Course_Code=COMP3900