Welcome back, everybody. >> Now that you've met the faculty teaching this course, we want to go into detail as to what the course covers and this is the chance for first secret about teaching online courses. We're giving you the details here in a broken out video, so that we don't have to change any of the substance videos that we have if we choose to have new topics and new assignments as we go along. You'll see this as we break things out into special videos that are easy to insert, remove, and replace as we go. So, first and foremost, this is part of a specialization in user interface design. Specializations in Coursera have a couple of different formats. This format is four courses that will take you four to five weeks each, an Intro to UI Design, a User Research and Design, Prototyping and Design, and Evaluating User Interfaces course. And then a Capstone project which is a group UI design and prototyping project. And that will take you to another anywhere from four to eight weeks depending on how you coordinate your group and how quickly you move through the steps of the project. >> So let's talk a little bit about the beginning of our course on user interface design. We're going to start out by giving you a basic introduction where we give examples of why you would want to study this, of what you can do with the kind of knowledge that you're going to gain from this course. We're going to go through various things that give you information about the process you'll be following. That will enable you to produce good and useful user interfaces and we're going to give you an introduction to some of the basic psychological and human factors knowledge that helps you understand the people that you'll be designing for. >> Then in our second course on user research and design. >> We'll go through a wide variety of methods for user research from analyzing artifacts to interviews to going out there and observing people and their work and activities. We'll talk about how we take the results of that research, analyze it and deliver it in a form that can be useful for starting a design process and evaluating your designs later. And then in the last part of that course we'll start moving from research to design as we look at the process of ideation of forming design ideas and then idea selection, identifying the most promising designs to move forward to into the next stage of development. >> In the next course, we’ll actually really dive in to how you're going to be creating your interfaces. We'll introduce you to some prototyping techniques that let you quickly get your idea into a concrete form so that you can immediately start to get feedback and iterate on the ideas. We're going to give you some information about design principles and design patterns you can follow to create good and effective designs. We'll introduce to you the notion of a design rationale so that when you're creating a design you're also along with it creating a good explanation of what it is that you made the decisions you made? Why you think it's going to be an effective design? We'll also introduce the notion of universal design or accessibility so that you'll be aware of the challenges of dealing with diverse populations and you were able to understand how to create interfaces that can be used by wide varieties of people. And then finally in this course, we'll talk about different platforms and contexts of use for mobile to different specific mobile platforms. >> And in the fourth course in evaluating user interfaces we're going to take you through two forms of evaluations. Starting with evaluation without users, techniques that range from formal analysis of interfaces to walkthroughs to checklist based, heuristic evaluation. And then evaluation with users including testing interfaces with users in a lab or in an informal setting and all of the forms of field studies, AB testing, what you can learn from log analysis and beta tests. Finally, the last piece of this specialization is a Capstone project. The pieces you've learned so far, will all come together in one group design project. Why group design project, because that's how design is typically done in the field, it takes many different points of view to put together in effective design. We will help form groups of learners and give you a list of topics you can chose from and then you're going to go through a full iterative design cycle. You will be doing user research. Doing an initial design round and prototype. Evaluate with and without users doing some revision along the way and in the end you're going to put together a design brief and a presentation using slides and audio or audio and video that presents your project, and how that project response to what you learned about your users how to improve along the way. As a way to document what you did and complete the entire specialization. >> So, throughout these courses there's going to be a number of recurring features. So first of all, there's five of us doing this course. We have diverse expertise, diverse methods, and so you'll get to see a little bit of that as we go. You'll also be seeing something interesting we have a number of interviews with leading experts in the field so you'll be getting even more perspectives. We'll also make good use of interactive discussion forums in the course where you'll be able to share ideas with other students. Get feedback on your own ideas and in some cases do structured activities where we ask you to do something and we ask you to give particular types of feedback to others. There's going to be a lot of hands on activities and assignments in this course, mostly peer-evaluated. Where you're going to be either analyzing things and then having your new peers giving you feedback on how good your analysis were, where they could be improved, or you're going to be producing something. A design, let's say, and then getting feedback from your peers, and throughout these courses we're going to be following an iterative learning process where we're going to introduce concepts, demonstrate them in lectures. And often then you will do them as a standalone activity then, either through a peer evaluated assignment or in a quiz and as part of that, you also will be evaluating with others to another really good learning activity. And then after you've done this in the four courses, in the final course the Capstone project you'll be going through all of the concepts and techniques that we've touch in the first four courses and practicing them in a full context. >> So, we're presenting this to you as a complete specialization because indeed that's how we think of it and how we designed it. But we do welcome learners who wish to pick and choose topics as they come along. If you came in and said I really notice but I'd love to pick up some information about user research or about log analysis, come take advantage of those pieces we're delighted to have you. We welcome people who want to browse or we welcome people who want to take a specific course from the process. If you're going to take a course from the collection out of order, understand there's stuff you're expected to know as you get through, they were designed in order. And if you're going to take several of them, we strongly encourage you to take them in order. The one exception is the Capstone, the Capstone's not open to people who don't come through the complete specialization, because we need people to work together in teams. And we need those teams to have the same common grounding so that they work through the same process as they complete that project. We do hope you'll see that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. The parts are wonderful individually, but when you take this together, this specialization very much matches a typical undergraduate or introductory graduate level course in user interface design. And the fact that you get to see things demonstrated to you, done individually out of context, and then done in a project context, very much mirrors the way we teach students at the University of Minnesota. Where we've taken those first two parts in a classroom, the third part out of the classroom, and woven them all together into this online format. So back to Course I, this is an introduction to your first course as well. The key concepts in this course start with what we would call the basic introduction. What is usability? Why does it matter? Over the course of the next several videos you'll see examples of great interfaces, awful interfaces, immense successes and disasters. To get you acquainted with the range of things that turned into problems with or successes with user interface design and usability engineering. We've followed that with processes, we're insuring usability, in this course will teach you about a task centered process. But we're also going to introduce you to many other processes including ones that are design focused so that you're aware of the range of processes that are out there in industry practice. And then we finish this course with a topic on understanding humans. The whole notion of human factors and of the basic psychology of perception, decision making, and action. Our shortcuts that allow you to go forward and design for people without having to understand each and every person as an individual. Once we understand people's memory limits, people's ways of perceiving we can use that information to craft it into our designs. >> And in this course you'll be doing three key activities. First, you'll be doing what we call a hall of fame, hall of shame interface analysis, and this is an activity where you look around, you notice an interface that you think is particularly good, particularly bad, and you give an explanation of why that is. Why is it good or bad? And you'll be sharing that with the class and getting feedback on that. The second key activity will be documenting tasks and walkthrough scenarios. Where you're going to go through and actually develop a set of well-defined tasks that someone could do with an interface and procedures, specific steps by which they could do them within a particular interface. And then finally, we're going to do a third activity, a principal based interface critique. Sort of like the hall of fame, hall of shame, where you're going to be analyzing an interface design. But in this case, you're going to be analyzing an interface design that we give to you, and you're going to be doing it specifically in terms of principles and concepts that we will be teaching you in this course. >> So we're glad that you're here. We hope you will enjoy and learn a great deal from this course and the entire specialization. >> And we'll see you next time when we introduce the notion of hall of fame and hall of shame interfaces.
