Term project user interface specifications in a usability engineering course

摘要

Term projects in an undergraduate Usability Engineering (UE) course provide opportunities for students to put the abstract ideas of what they have learned in class into practice. Projects provide students with opportunities to learn that the process of usability engineering is rarely as smooth as it would seem in the abstract. Moreover, term projects give students the opportunity to learn about specific methodologies and notations.One critical phase of the term project is the user interface specification; in our undergraduate UE course we have found the specification phase to be a significant pedagogic challenge. Key elements to that challenge are: 1) Presenting the project requirements in such a way that the students can generate a specification, 2) Defining the form and format for student work, 3) Teaching the process of specification and 4) Assessing the students' work. In this paper, we describe our approach to each of these four challenges. Since 1996, we have had good success with our approach; however, student data suggests that students still find the UE specification process difficult. In Spring 2003, we added some extra steps in our process that seem to lead to greater student understanding and success.