Usability has become critical to distinguishing products in the marketplace. This course teaches the fundamentals of product usability, including models of how people interact with systems, design techniques, and evaluation techniques. Specific techniques are covered for novel interaction technologies including wearable devices, augmented reality, and virtual reality. An emerging area within usability is persuasion, which is used to nudge people to specific behaviours, as diverse as stopping smoking, filing expense reports on time, or returning to an e-commerce website. Gamification is a technique supporting persuasion where game-like elements are used to increase engagement with an interactive product. Gamification has been successfully employed in consumer products and business systems, and as the basis for games for health and educational games. The course covers the psychology of persuasion, specific gamification techniques, and gamification case studies. The course addresses equity in user interface design, specifically addressing techniques for increasing the accessibility of interactive systems to persons with disabilities.
Usability has become critical to distinguishing products in the marketplace. This course teaches the fundamentals of product usability, including models of how people interact with systems, design techniques, and evaluation techniques. Specific techniques are covered for novel interaction technologies including wearable devices, augmented reality, and virtual reality. An emerging area within usability is persuasion, which is used to nudge people to specific behaviours, as diverse as stopping smoking, filing expense reports on time, or returning to an e-commerce website. Gamification is a technique supporting persuasion where game-like elements are used to increase engagement with an interactive product. Gamification has been successfully employed in consumer products and business systems, and as the basis for games for health and educational games. The course covers the psychology of persuasion, specific gamification techniques, and gamification case studies. The course addresses equity in user interface design, specifically addressing techniques for increasing the accessibility of interactive systems to persons with disabilities.
