autumn 2009
CS147: Intro to HCI Design - More Information & FAQs
grading
Each assignment is graded out of a set amount of points (these can be seen on each assignment's page). These points add up to 825. Additionally, the examination (Week 8) is graded out of 125 points, and class/studio participation is graded out of 50 points, for a total of 1000 points in the course.Credit/No credit: Students registered for the class will receive a letter grade—the "credit/no credit" option is not available.
regrade policy
It is very important to us that all assignments are properly graded. If you believe there is an error in your assignment or exam grading, please submit an explanation in writing to your studio TA within 7 days of receiving the grade. No regrade requests will be accepted orally, and no regrade requests will be accepted more than 7 days after receipt of the assignment.
submitting work
Submit homework, view others' work, sign up for section, and see your grades at this link. Use your SUNet Username / Password to log in.self-assessment
How it will work: Every week, after studio, you will log in and submit your self-grading for that week's assignment. For us to take your self-grading into account, we need it by Friday noon*. The TAs will perform a more nuanced grading of your assignment without looking at your own rating. After all the grading has been done, the TAs will look at your self-grading, adjusting grades and giving related feedback where appropriate.
What we hope to achieve: Being able to successfully assess your own performance in comparison to a given criterion is a skill that you will draw benefit from, both as a student and in your professional career. This is not always an easy task and we hope that this exercise will help you improve your self-assessment skills and get you start thinking about how you are evaluated in different situations.
Once again, the deadlines are: Weekly assignments are due on Thursdays at noon. Weekly self-gradings are due on Fridays at noon. (If your studio is on Friday 11-11.50, please perform your self-assessment as soon as possible after you finish studio.)
studio times
Thursday
- 2:15 - 3:05 #1
Jesse Cirimele (Gates 260) - 2:15 - 3:05 #2
Catherine Harrel (Gates 359) - 2:15 - 3:05 #3
Snir Kodesh (Gates 167) - 2:15 - 3:05 #4
Akshay Kothari (d.school 524a) - 3:15 - 4:05 #1
Snir Kodesh (d.school 524a) - 4:15 - 5:05 #1
Jesse Cirimele (Gates 167) - 4:15 - 5:05 #2
Maria Sandberg (Gates 392) - 4:15 - 5:05 #3
Abel Allison (Gates 359)
Friday
- 10:00 - 10:50 #1
Maria Sandberg (Gates 498) - 11:00 - 11:50 #1
Akshay Kothari (Gates 498)
attendance & on-time work policy
Attendance of all studios is mandatory. If you have to miss a studio, you must let your studio leader know in advance, and receive an acknowledgment from the studio leader. You are allowed one excused absence (i.e. reported and acknowledged) for the quarter without penalty; thereafter you will receive zero credit for the missed studio. To receive credit for attendance, you must arrive on time.
No late assignments will be accepted, but you may submit them early.
The participation grade will consider both lecture and studio participation.
prerequisites
CS106B or equivalent programming experience is a prerequisite for this course. The prerequisite exists because all students will need some fluency in building interactive systems to complete the project. Every student must make a significant contribution to their team's implementation; students who are unable to do so should not take the class. That said, some may do more of the programming work, and others more of the user testing work. Project teams will benefit from being multidisciplinary. Students with less programming experience (and e.g., more design experience) should consider partnering with students who with complementary strengths. Additionally, we presume that all students will have access to a digital camera for use in assignments.
This is a 4-unit class
Undergraduate students are required to take the course for 4 units. Graduate students may take it for 3 units, provided they are hitting the 10-unit limit (proof required).
experimental participation (pass/incomplete):
Students are required to participate as subjects in HCI research experiments for 3 study "units" (roughly 3 hours) during the quarter. Students who do not complete this requirement will be given an incomplete. Sign up for studies on CHIME, and be sure to select CS147-Fall-09 as the course you're taking the quarter, in order to filter for studies that qualify for experimental participation for this course. All students are required to participate. This requirement is independent of the number of registrar units. Not every student will be able to participate in every study. Some studies have background or demographic requirements; other times a student's participation will be unable to particupate because they are also researcher in the lab conducting the study. There will be enough (and diverse enough) studies that all students can fulfull this requirement.contacting us
Your questions are important to us. You can help by directing them to the right place. Check the FAQs first. Please allow us 24 hours to reply:
I have a general question (clarification of assignments, "what did I miss in lecture", HCI talk)
Post to CS147 General Google Group (monitored daily by a TA)
I have a technical question (how do I make the Ipod Touch show me the current location?)
Post to CS147 Tech Google Group (monitored daily by a TA)
I have a personal question (absences, emergencies, grading questions)
Email your studio leader at cs147-{their first name}@cs.stanford.edu (so, for example, to e-mail Jesse send an email to cs147-Jesse@cs.stanford.edu)
frequently asked questions
1. Guidelines on using Wizard of Oz in the final project
The reason we implement things is to learn about how to better design the interaction, not to do busy work. By making your project more realistic, you will uncover design issues that may not be apparent with Wizard of Oz alone. Your final project will be evaluated on the design of the interactions, and you are certain to produce a better interaction if it is more realistic.
Good heuristics to decide what to implement:
- If you can implement it, do it
- You should be focusing on the interaction design. If implementing it will take an inordinate amount of time, you should Wizard of Oz it in the most realistic way
- If it would be impossible for anyone to implement it, your design is wrong
To make this more concrete, consider the following two examples:
You are building a navigation application for pedestrians. This application will leverage GPS information to support wayfinding. In this instance it would be highly recommended that you implement GPS functionality for real, since it is central to the application.
You are building a social photo sharing application. Amongst a host of other features, you’d like this application to geotag photos if a GPS location is available. In this case, it may be appropriate to Wizard of Oz the GPS functionality, since it is not central to the application.
While implementing GPS functionality would take the same amount of effort in both cases, there is a much larger potential payoff for implementing it in the first case because it impacts a much larger portion of the interaction design.
2. How should I pick my teammates?
A: Your first two assignments will be done individually as you gravitate towards a certain topic. Then you'll be asked to form groups of 3 in your studio to take a deeper dive into that topic and to build a working prototype. Your goal is to form a team whose members are passionate about the same topic, work well together, and whose skills are complementary. Your team will need somebody who is particularly talented and excited about implementing the design ideas (DEVELOPMENT LEAD), running the studies (EVALUATION LEAD), and eliciting and design for true needs of users (DESIGN LEAD). All of you should participate in all the tasks but each of these areas needs an "owner." If you are thinking about choosing teammates based on friendship alone, consider the following:
- Advantages: you'll like be comfortable enough to be honest and upfront about what you are interested in and can accomplish. You might be amenable to a more flexible schedule (e.g. working at odd hours in odd places) and may be able to offset any tension with jokes. Having fun while working on your research often yields better work.
- Disadvantages: you may focus more on fun than productivity, then be stuck with all-nighters to get the work done and a less-interesting product. This may put strain on your friendship and you may lose a friend. You may overlook the fact that your skills overlap too much - which can be a problem, for example, if you don't have anybody to implement your ideas or to speak with potential users.
3. What is the platform for the course?
While you're free to implement your interface however you like, we strongly recommend creating a Web application for the iPod/iPhone using HTML, CSS, Javascript, and PHP. Apple has kindly loaned us some iPods for you to use. The reason for this is that the teaching staff can provide technical advice and assistance with that platform. If you use another platform, you are still fully responsible for completing a functional interface, and you're "off-piste": we won't be able to help if you get lost. We will teach these technologies in lab.
4. If we're creating web applications for use on an iPod/iPhone, does that mean I need a mac?
No. Because we're using standard Web technologies (e.g., PHP) to create the applications, you can use any platform and editor you like.
5. What will the exam cover?
For the exam, you should be able to...- Describe merits and drawbacks of interfaces using the ideas from Direct Manipulation & Representations (and other relevant class topics), e.g., what makes an interface more "natural"?
- Quantitatively analyze input performance using Fitts' Law
- Critique an interface using Heuristic Evaluation (and other relevant class topics). You need not memorize all the heuristic names, but given a list, you should be able to use them.
- Improve the visual/information design of an existing interface using e.g., principles from the tufte readings, and the design lectures
- Improve the information scent of an existing interface using e.g., the scent reading
- Improve the collaborative potential of an interface using principles from the social software lecture
- Describe how to conduct a user study and/or critique a given user study design (both in the "lab" and online).
- Describe the relative merits of alternative study designs (both in the lab and online).
- Test for statistical significance using a t-test or CHI-squared test. (You won't need a calculator, and you don't need to memorize any formulas. A table and formula(s) will be provided.)
- Be generally familiar with vocabulary terms from lecture & the readings