User Experience for Software Designers

3 Units

An introduction to main concepts and current issues in software user experience. Intended for majors and non-majors. Will include readings, discussion, critique of sites, proposals for improvement, and crowdsourced evaluation of those proposals. Focus is mainly on challenges to user experience from the technical side, recognizing that business and marketing priorities often intrude. Design clinic, focus group, Wizard of Oz testing, improved empathy, and how one might argue technical merits to product management. Agile methods, latency, legacy, feature creep, aggressive AI, user agency, coding priorities, coding for spec, frameworks, UI look and feel, security, and other technical concerns will be studied as contributors to UX.