Overview / Grading
This class is a weekly, two hour, hands-on workshop for User Interface Prototyping. It will run for 13 sessions, from January 22 to April 23, with an additional week for final presentations (April 30). If you enroll for credit (one unit, pass/fail), you must attend every session or submit a make-up assignment. To get credit, you will be required to submit 3 projects (one approximately every four weeks) and participate in a critique process for each of them. Lastly, you will create a mini portfolio showcasing your final prototype as well as your process. It can be a static document or a link to a hosted webpage. You’re also expected to participate in class sessions as well as in the project critiques.
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Supplies
To cover the cost of supplies needed throughout the semester, we are asking everyone to pay a $10 lab fee. The facilitators will take care of ordering the supplies needed. Any leftover money will be used for refreshments on the final day of class.
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Student Facilitators
If you have any questions, contact one of the student facilitators
Sara Cambridge: scambridge at ischool
Naila Khalawi: nkhalawi at ischool
Bryan Rea: bryan at ischool
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Course Goals
There are many ways to create a user interface prototype but most fall into one of three buckets: lo fidelity, medium fidelity, and hi fidelity. The goal of this class is to introduce different tools and techniques from each bucket used by professional UX designers in their everyday work and to help create a framework fro deciding which methods are most appropriate for the task at hand.
Most weeks will feature a guest speaker who will first talk about how he or she creates and uses prototypes in their work and will then lead the class in a workshop where we will start creating a prototype in a similar fashion. From lo fidelity methods such as paper and pen to hi fidelity methods such as wireframing and simple coding, you will get broad exposure to many of the ways that prototypes for user interfaces are created. You will have the opportunity to work both individually and in collaborative groups with other students throughout the semester. Finally, you will also get experience presenting your work to others and learning techniques for constructive feedback and iteration.
A few of the prototyping techniques we’ll be covering this semester include sketching, Wizard-of-Oz, video prototyping, wireframing, designing for mobile and software for prototyping.
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