Brief Course Description of Graphical User Interfaces: Design and Usability

Purpose	When people have a choice of products with similar functionality and cost, they will often chose the one that is easier to use. As a result, the success of software products in a competitive marketplace, as well as its adaptation by users within an organization, is intimately tied to the quality of its user interface. This course is about giving you the knowledge and skills to design and engineer usable graphical interfaces.
What you will learn	Through this course, you will learn how to design interfaces that are usable by people. It is not a programming course; rather, you will discover: how to apply principles of good design to any graphical interface; how to follow the major steps in a graphical user interface development cycle; how to rapidly prototype interfaces; how to debug your interface through low-cost evaluation methods.
The Audience	This course is oriented towards a diverse audience. Typical attendees are: project managers who direct software development that includes graphical user interfaces project team members who are trying to fit interface development into the software engineering design cycle programmers and other members of a team designing a graphical user interfaces people responsible for purchasing software that must be usable by people Anyone with an interest in design.
Course Structure	The course will unfold by examining specific aspects of interface design, prototyping, and evaluation. Theoretical lectures will be augmented by case studies and discussions of interface successes and failures. You will apply the theoretical knowledge learnt to a series of examples that brings you through different parts of the design and evaluation cycle.
The Instructor	Saul Greenberg is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Calgary. He regularly teaches introductory and advanced courses on human computer interaction at both the undergraduate and graduate level, as well as to industry. His course has been featured in the ACM SIGH Bulletin, as well as the ACM Interactions magazine. Saul Greenberg is an active researcher in Human Computer Interaction, and now specializes in Groupware. He is the author and editor of several books, including "The Computer User as Toolsmith" (Cambridge University Press, 1993), "Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Groupware" (Academic Press, 1992), "Groupware for Real Time Drawing" (McGraw Hill, Europe), and "Readings in Human Computer Interaction: Towards the Year 2000" (Morgan-Kauffman, 1995). He has served on many academic reviews committees, and is on the editorial board of the "International Journal of Human Computer Studies", and "Computer Supported Cooperative Work".