2024/25 Undergraduate Module Catalogue

COMP2811 User Interfaces

10 creditsClass Size: 500

Module manager: Dr Julian Brooks
Email: J.Brooks2@leeds.ac.uk

Taught: Semester 1 (Sep to Jan) View Timetable

Year running 2024/25

Pre-requisites

COMP1711	Procedural Programming
COMP1721	Object Oriented Programming

This module is not approved as a discovery module

Module summary

With user interfaces continuously evolving and the emergence of new platforms, applications and devices, it is important to understand the fundamentals of people-centred Interaction Design to enable their effective use. Developing new interfaces and ideas is fun and creative but it also must be grounded on systematic evaluation techniques and an appreciation of human behaviour. In this module you will be introduced to theories for user experience design and industry processes of analysis, design, prototyping and evaluation to translate ideas into product. Principles of visual design, perception, and cognition will be explored to inform effective understanding and application. Practical competencies in engineering realities of building graphical user interfaces through modern toolkits will be explored through project work.

Objectives

This module provides an opportunity to develop an understanding of design consideration and implementation of user interfaces motivated from a practical and theoretical viewpoint. This module contributes to developing responsible computer science practitioners who are aware of the impact of their software. In this module students will also develop group working skills.

Learning outcomes
Upon successful completion of this module you will have demonstrated the ability to:
- Discuss why human-centred software development is important.
- Summarise the basic precepts of psychological and social interaction.
- Develop and make use of a conceptual vocabulary for analysing human interaction with software: affordance, conceptual models, feedback, and so forth.
- Define a people-centric design process that can explicitly recognise and support a wide range of accessibility requirements.
- Design, conduct and produce a simple usability test for an existing software application.
- From a range of diverse groups, undertake and document a requirements analysis.
- Produce an application with a fully functional graphical user interface.
- Explain and implement GUI programming concepts: including event handling, constraint-based layout management, etc.
- Implement a graphical application in specified programming languages and toolkits, together with help and documentation that supports a graphical user interface.
- Conduct a quantitative evaluation and discuss/report the results.
- Discuss the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines

Syllabus

This module covers the following topic areas:
- Contexts for HCI (anything with a digital interface, e.g., web, business applications, IoT, mobile appss and gaming)
- Processes for people-centric development, e.g., early focus on end-users, iterative design, empirical testing, qualitative analysis
- Differing metrics for evaluation, e.g., utility, efficiency, learnability, user satisfaction
- Usability heuristics and the principles of usability testing
- Physical capabilities that inform interaction design, e.g., colour perception, ergonomics
- Cognitive models that inform interaction design, e.g., attention, perception and recognition, movement, and memory; gulfs of expectation and execution
- Social models that inform interaction design, e.g., culture, communication, networks and organisations
- Principles of good design and good designers; engineering trade-offs
- Accessibility, - designing interfaces to work for all people.
- Elements of visual design (layout, colour, fonts, labelling etc.)
- Task analysis, including qualitative aspects of generating specific analytic models
- Low-fidelity (paper), high-fidelity and native prototyping
- Quantitative evaluation techniques, e.g., keystroke-level evaluation
- Help and documentation
- Handling human/system failure
- User interface standards
- Object-oriented implementation of GUIs

Teaching methods

Delivery type	Number	Length hours	Student hours
Laboratory	10	2.00	20.00
Lecture	20	1.00	20.00
Private study hours			60.00
Total Contact hours			40.00
Total hours (100hr per 10 credits)			100.00

Opportunities for Formative Feedback

You will be provided with a range of formative worksheets and projects that directly support lecture content and support the final summative assessment throughout the module. Students have opportunities to receive feedback during weekly lab sessions, including informal progress presentations of your assessed final group project.

Methods of assessment

Coursework

Assessment type	Notes	% of formal assessment
In-course Assessment	Coursework 1	50.00
In-course Assessment	Coursework 2 (Group Presentation)	50.00
Total percentage (Assessment Coursework)		100.00

Resits are assessed by individual coursework only.

Reading list

The reading list is available from the Library website

Last updated: 26/09/2023

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