IS3: Interactive Information Systems 3 - Module Description

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This course is taught jointly by Chris Johnson and by Rob Sutherland.

Rationale

Interactive systems courses in levels 1 (Human Computer Interaction), level 3 (Interactive Systems) and level 4 (User Interface Technology) address issues and content in the areas of interactive system design and implementation. Also, each course will organise its material around themes (challenging application areas) and projects. In Interactive Systems 3, the themes are the design, implementation and evaluation of web-based systems. These form a nicely contrasting set of practical, application-related issues. Theoretical material will be introduced as needed to help students understand the nature of interaction and interactive systems sufficiently to be able to produce effective designs and evaluate them. Detailed material on formal experimental evaluation will be presented so that students will be able to test for quantitative differences between their designs and other systems. The programming work on this part of the course will be done in Java and Swing.

Aims

The aims of the module are

• to offer students the opportunity to become familiar with one of the most important interaction paradigms.
• to enable students to become skilled in the use of techniques and tools for modelling, implementing and evaluating web-based interactive systems
• to enable students to apply the theories, techniques and tools presented in the course via challenging exercises which combine design, implementation and evaluation

Objectives

At the end of the course, a student will be able to:

• describe the key problems in structuring and presenting information over the World Wide Web.
• understand the perceptual and cognitive issues involved in site development.
• understand the human and technical problems of supporting web accessibility.
• design, implement and evaluate a simple interactive web-based system using Java and Swing
• understand and be able to use informal evaluation techniques
• understand and be able to use formal experimental techniques for evaluating interfaces
• understand where the lecture material fits within the whole area of HCI research and practice

Pre and co-requisites

Advanced Programming 3

Content

• Web design (5 lectures)
  Techniques for improved home page visibility, basics of information retrieval, precision and recall, Nielsen's deep linking. The problems of devising suitable navigation support - sequential vs hierarchical structures, site map design. Issues in content creation, download speeds, style sheets and corporate consistency guidelines, browser version detection. The differences between designing pages for extranets and intranets.
  
• Evaluation (5 lectures)
  Informal Evaluation: Types of informal evaluation, formative and summative evaluation,' Think aloud' protocols, questionnaires, interviews
  Formal Evaluation: Experimental design, choosing hypotheses and variables, analysing experimental results, basic statistical analysis
• User Interfaces in Java and Swing (10 lectures)
  Interaction objects. Event-action dialogue. Model-view-controller architecture. Configuring composite interaction objects. Constructing custom interaction objects.

Assessment

Assessment will be by examination (75%) and practical exercises (25%). An initial web-based evaluation and design exercise will be worth 50% of the assessed exercise marks. It will be handed out in week 12 and handed back in week 18. The implementation exercise will also be worth 50%. It be handed out around week 16 and handed in during week 20.

Course Texts

Required:

• Shneiderman, B. (1998) Designing the User Interface (3rd edition). Addison Wesley.

• Preece, Rogers, Sharp, Benyon, Holland & Carey. (1994) Human-Computer Interaction. Addison Wesley.
• Dix, Finlay, Abowd & Beale. (1998) Human-Computer Interaction (2nd ed). Prentice Hall.