CS 468/568 HCI 2: Inclusive Design: Fall 2023

Instructor: Dr. Burnett
My Office: KEC 3051
E-Mail: mylastname @ eecs.oregonstate.edu
Dr. Burnett's Office Hours will be listed on my home page
TA: Bhavika Madhwani Email: madhwanb@oregonstate.edu
TA's Office Hours are: TBA (location: KEC atrium)
Class location: KEC 1001, 10:00-11:50 MW

Course Description

Inclusive design has a strong business case: designing software that works for more customers than before has a wider potential market. The challenge is to find ways to design inclusively without having to have a separate design for each differently abled customer.

One intellectual tool that can help with this is personas. Personas' use in HCI and User Experience jobs/fields is widespread in industry, so these skills should be useful from both HCI research and practice. Personas are also a cornerstone in some companies' software requirements and design processes, so these skills should also be useful to students heading for Software Engineering careers.

Course objectives

At its heart, this is an HCI methods course, focusing on inclusive design and all aspects of Persona creating, use, and dissemination. The goals are that by the end of this course, you will be able to:

1. CS468/568: Describe inclusive design.
2. CS468: Identify problems with a design's inclusiveness. CS568: Analyze a design's inclusiveness.
3. CS468/568: Describe the persona lifecycle.
4. CS468/568: Apply each phase of the persona lifecycle to the creation of your own persona.
5. CS468/568: Use personas to design an inclusive user interface.
6. CS468: Describe inclusiveness evaluation methods. CS568: Evaluate the inclusiveness of a design using an inclusiveness evaluation method.

Course content

• Populations for inclusive design
• Methods for inclusive design
• Methods for analyzing and evaluating inclusiveness of a design
• Learning about different populations for inclusive designs
• Introduction to personas
• The personas lifecycle

Readings/assignments schedule: see Canvas

Prerequisites

This class has as a prerequisite having already taken HCI 1. This can be fulfilled by:

• CS352 (on-campus every year, e-campus every term), or
• CS565 (on-campus every spring), or
• equivalent courses at other universities.

How the course will be conducted, method of instruction

You'll do a persona-based inclusive design project, with a team. I'm anticipating little or no programming in this course. There will be some lectures by me, but probably fewer than half of the classes will be like this. Some of the class will be studio style, with teams critiquing each others' work, and based on team presentations in which the class jointly provides feedback on some aspect of a team's project. In short, it will be highly interactive.

Grading

There will be a number of interim assignments, and a final presentation of your project. There will also be a final exam.

I have high expectations, and expect performance worthy of advanced students in computer science. Thus, in this class, "A" does not mean "adequate" or "nothing wrong" -- it means "excellent". For an A, you should expect to dig deep and get the most you can out of the class.

Weights:

• Final Exam (take-home, in assigned pairs): total = 37.5%
• Assignments, presentations, contributions to class discussions = 25%
• Final project (done through a series of milestones/deliverables throughout the term, culminating at the end)= 37.5%
• Final adjustment for contributions to your team's project: Many of your assignments are as part of a team. I'll be collecting data all term on team contributions, so please make sure you're doing your fair share to the team's work. Every year, I find that for a handful of students I have to make course grade adjustments based on these data.

Textbook

1. Required: ISBN/SKU 978-0-12-381418-0, Tamara Adlin and John Pruitt, The Essential Persona Lifecycle: Your Guide to Building and Using Personas, 2010, Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann/Elsevier. (Available new or used at the OSU Bookstore. Also at Amazon as a print book, rental or Kindle book, and at the Elsevier Store as a print book or e-book (for desktop or laptop).)
2. Required: Trap Cards Deck. Author: Medlock. Available at OSU Bookstore.

We will also have selected readings from other sources, but you don't have to buy those.

Other Resources

• Canvas: CS 468 AND CS 568
• InclusiveMag diagram enlarged
• Microsoft's vision statement.
• Curb cuts
• Richard Ladner quote
• Some papers about personas
• Photos showing various kinds of color blindness
• Cute little boy
• Sad little boy
• Very young little boy
• Wicked Witch of the West
• FIGMA prototyping tool: TBA
• Sample midterm exam.
• Accessibility making a difference: Glasses for color-blind people.
• Resources for HW 1:
  • HW #1 Template
  • HW #1 Sample

Inclusiveness in this class

In this class, all voices are welcome and will be heard. The more different kinds of thinking that are brought to a group, the better the outcomes (this has been shown again and again, both through scientific investigations and business practices). This class is one way to expand your ability to appreciate the value of multiple perspectives and kindly negotiate differences of opinions, as per the OSU Learning Goal for Graduates.

Students with Disabilities

Accommodations for students with disabilities are determined and approved by Disability Access Services (DAS). If you, as a student, believe you are eligible for accommodations but have not obtained approval please contact DAS immediately at 541-737-4098 or at http://ds.oregonstate.edu. DAS notifies students and faculty members of approved academic accommodations and coordinates implementation of those accommodations. While not required, students and faculty members are encouraged to discuss details of the implementation of individual accommodations.

Margaret M. Burnett
Date of last update: Sep. 21, 2023