New technologies provide the means to build superb new systems, as well as phenomenally ugly and awkward systems that still fully meet their performance and functional requirements. This course will explore several approaches towards a scientific understanding of basic issues of usability, representation and coordination that arise in interface design and related areas, such as how to best organize complex information in multimedia. There will be some focus on distributed cooperative work and semiotics. See the course outline for more detail.

We distinguish the following five levels for interface design issues:

1. technology;
2. ergonomics;
3. individual psychology;
4. sociology and group psychology; and
5. organizational issues.

This course will focus on the last three issues, especially the fourth, and in this regard will consider the following techniques:

• narratology - the study of stories;
• discourse analysis - the study of discourse;
• semiotics - the study of signs and meaning; and
• ethnomethodology - the sociology of ordinariness.

One case study is a system being built at UCSD CSE to support distributed cooperative software engineering over the www. Prototypes of parts of this system can be seen at http://www.cs.ucsd.edu/groups/tatami. Some issues here include: how to present proofs as webpages; how to make proofs easier to follow, e.g., by linking formal material to background material; how to motivate difficult proof steps; proof editors vs. proof browsers; direct manipulation vs. command line.

Wednesday, 11:15am-2:05pm, Room APM 3218.

Section ID 304560, Section A00

The course will draw heavily on Shneiderman, and we will read all of Latour; other required readings will made available on the web or handed out in class.

• Designing the User Interface, Ben Shneiderman, Addison Wesley, 1998.
• Aramis, or the Love of Technology, Bruno Latour, Harvard University Press, 1996.

Recommended Books

• The Literary Mind, by Mark Turner, Oxford, 1997.
• The Design of Everyday Things, by Donald A. Norman, Doubleday, 1988.
• Requirements Engineering: Social and Technical Issues, ed. Marina Jirotka and Joseph Goguen, Academic Press, 1994.
• Algebraic Semantics of Imperative Programs, Joseph Goguen and Grant Malcolm, MIT Press, 1996 (for those who want to get deeper into algebraic semiotics).

• Ben Shneiderman's war on agents on the Scientific American website; this has links to lots of interesting places (this was added 26feb99).

Grades will be based on the first 4 items below, especially the first; obviously your class participation and homework should reflect your familiarity with the readings; items in "Miscellaneous" are for your interest and/or amusement.

1. Reading assignments
2. Homework assignments
3. Projects
4. Class discussion
5. Miscellaneous