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California State University Stanislaus

CS 3500: Human-Centered Design

Summer 2020

M Tu Th 6:00 pm - 8:30 pm, Zoom / Canvas

Instructor: Dr. Megan Thomas


[Syllabus]       [Announcements]       [Schedule/Reflection Deadlines]       [Homeworks]       [Resources]       [News]

Welcome to CS3500, an introduction to human-centered design. Human-Centered Design is both an old and a new area of study. When called "human factors engineering", the study of making tools and devices fit human beings has been around for decades. Recent developments in technology, making more and more powerful tools more and more integrated with our lives, have given new urgency to the need for easy to use tools.

We will study the principles of usability and human centered design. We will study what makes a tool easily usable, by humans, and a design philosophy that can help create usable tools. Bad design can cause user irritation, errors, misunderstanding, and occasionally outright chaos. But preventing poor designs is not as easy as it may seem... what is good for one user may not suit another. Designs that benefit adults may not benefit children, or the elderly.

In this class we will explore topics from computer science, sociology, biology, psychology, cognitive science, anthropology, communications studies, graphic design, industrial design and other fields.

Topics include

This is a General Education UD-B course.

Announcements and Upcoming Events:

7/9/2020 After you have completed your final project and sent in your group report, please fill out this survey. The survey will allow you to provide feedback about what each partner contributed to the group work.
7/8/2020 Quiz 3 is a 35 minute quiz. Once started, the quiz cannot be stopped and restarted.

For each question, select the single best answer.

Try to have a stable connection to the internet.

The quiz will be on-line starting Thursday, 7/9, at 8:30 pm, and go off-line on Saturday, 7/11, at 10 pm. Make certain to take it before then. Once gone, the quiz is gone. This deadline is *firm*.

Canvas will not kick you out after 35 minutes, but you will lose points for every minute over the time limit you use.

7/8/2020 Answers to questions asked in breakout rooms

Yes, there will be a Quiz 3. Available later this week -- at least Friday and Saturday, probably. Exact dates available will be emailed and posted, as for previous quizzes.

One design project report per group.

If you wish to use a Late Day on the design project report, you may. For example, if your group turns in the report on Saturday, each member of the group "uses" one Late Day. (4 Late Days per semester.)

Demonstrating your paper prototype to me is, more or less, "turning it in". My grading on the prototypes completeness and thoughtfulness will be based on what I see then. (If you revise the prototype after that point, I won't be able to "see" how revisions fit into the design -- I need you, the designers, to demonstrate how the design fits together.)

Yes, I will use your scenarios to "visit" your web site. I will also make up my own. And I will check, as thoroughly as I can, to make sure your web site includes *all* the information and features on the list we brainstormed.

If it is a choice between showing your paper prototype by holding papers up to a webcam, or by posting photographs into a Google Doc and using Zoom's "share screen," I recommend the latter approach. Good, sharp focus is much more likely with photographs, and, if Zoom goes down, you can just send me a "share" link to your Google Doc and the show will go on. (Yes, there will be a lot of scrolling up and down to get to the right photo. That's fine.)

6/26/2020 The quiz is a 35 minute quiz. Once started, the quiz cannot be stopped and restarted.

For each question, select the single best answer.

Make certain you have a stable connection to the internet.

The quiz will be on-line starting Friday, 6/26, at 10 pm, and go off-line on Monday, 6/29, at 11:59 pm. Make certain to take it before then. Once gone, the quiz is gone. This deadline is *firm*.

Canvas will not kick you out after 35 minutes, but you will lose points for every minute over the time limit you use.

6/18/2020 "All cell phone comparison" spreadsheet is in this document.
Remember, since each phone in the collection was analyzed by a different person, the results need to be taken with a grain of salt. Some of the difference between phones is due to the difference between the people performing the analysis, not the phones themselves. But, using this, you can see how your cell phone compares to other cell phones used on our campus.

As we discussed in class, any task analysis that involves no M operators at all is flawed. How does anyone perform a task without using their brain? Our brains are involved in every action we choose to take, so every choice is one more M. Every choice in a task (including picking "Bob" instead of "Xiu Ying" to say hello to), is one more M operation. For this reason, I did not copy student KLM-GOMS results where the M value was 0 into the "all students" spreadsheet.

Use this to inform and enrich your cell phone analysis in Essay 5.

6/16/2020 Here is the list of tasks we chose to analyze, with tips to help you complete the assignment.
Here is a spreadsheet with all the tasks we chose filled in in column C for you. The full descriptions of the tasks, which we wrote in class, have been copied off to the right of the "Sanity Check" column.
6/13/2020 The chapter on quantitative testing (plus a optional chapter on science vs. engineering testing) is now available on our Office 365 / OneDrive folder.
Reading reflection deadline will be on class schedule page.
6/11/2020 The quiz is a 35 minute quiz. Once started, the quiz cannot be stopped and restarted.

For each question, select the single best answer.

Make certain you have a stable connection to the internet.

The quiz will be on-line starting Friday, 6/12, at 4 pm, and go off-line on Monday, 6/15, at 5:00 pm. Make certain to take it before then. Once gone, the quiz is gone. This deadline is *firm*.

Canvas will not kick you out after 35 minutes, but you will lose points for every minute over the time limit you use.

6/3/2020 As a result of our in-class voting on Tuesday, June 2, class will be held in synchronous mode via Zoom meetings from 6 to 7 pm each Monday, Tuesday and Thursday. The remaining hour and a half of active, "class time" participation on those days will be held asynchronously. Most likely the activities will be in Canvas, and take the form of VoiceThread lectures (me) and comments (you), or "discussions" in Canvas, and so on.
(If you found some particular asynchronous activity in one of your spring courses effective in improving your learning, let me know. We might try it.)
6/2/2020 Welcome to CS 3500, Human-Centered Design!

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