[SOUND] Hello and welcome to the specialization on user interface design. I'm Joe Konstan, distinguished McKnight professor and distinguished university teaching professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Minnesota, and we're delighted to have you here. This first video is a chance to meet your course faculty, hear a bit about what user interface design is about, and get a glimpse into what we have in store if you join us for the next 20 or so weeks. So first thing's first I'd like to introduce or in fact have introduced to you the rest of our faculty starting with my right your left. >> So my name is Brent Hecht, I'm the assistant professor of computer science and engineering here at the University of Minnesota. Starting in the fall I will be the assistant professor of communication and computer science at Northwestern University. >> And my name is Lana Yarosh. I am also an assistant professor in computer science engineering here at the University of Minnesota. >> Hi, my name is Haiyi Zhu. I'm an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the state University of Minnesota. >> And I'm Loren Terveen. I'm a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Minnesota. >> You'll be hearing a lot more from each of us as we go forward, but first things first. What is this user interface design about? And I want to start with a bit of a history. I hope you can't tell looking at me, but I have to admit I started programming in the era of Fortran and Cobol and key-punch machines and card readers. Back in the days when, let's be honest, nobody worried about user interface design. Nobody worried because computers were immensely expensive, and all of the engineering was put into the idea that we were going to make this machine as efficient as possible. I worked for a bank writing Cobol, and there were immense, complex systems designed to make sure that this machine which cost the bank a million dollars a month was continually being fed by different people so that it never sat idle. The idea that we who were making far less than that, I was making $150 a week, were important in the process was never even dreamed up. In fact, there was a team of 12 people whose job was to just keep the printer running by feeding paper in all the time because the printer was more expensive than any of us. Well fortunately things have changed. You probably have in your cell phone, maybe in your watch, a computer more powerful than the ones I was programming. And as computers became not only more powerful and cheaper, but available to every day people for every day tasks, we started to realize that the vast majority of systems built with computers were really miserable to use. I'm sure you've all had this experience. Whether you've been trying to figure out what's the cheapest hotel room or air fare if you used an online reservation system. If you've gone to a web page and you wonder why is it that as soon as I go back to this it clears all the fields away and I have to start over? There's lots of examples of systems that are clunky, systems that are painful. As you'll learn later in this specialization, systems that have hurt people and caused financial disasters all because they were very hard to work with people. On the other hand, every once in a while, you come up against a system that's beautiful, elegant, fluid, where using it just feels natural. You come up to it, you stop thinking of it as a computer, and you just get your work done, you get the money you want out of a bank, you figure out that you're listening to music and you stop thinking that you're programming some sort of computer device. Well the goal of user interface design is to make these experiences fluid not clunky, and that's what we're going to teach you in this series of courses and in the Capstone Project. So let me give you a very brief overview of what those components are. We're really going through three major components. The first one is user research. What do you have to learn about the people who might be using the system that you're designing? What you need to know about the tasks they're trying to complete, their technical skills, the distractions that they might be experiencing while they're using your system? All of the things that might help you not only learning directly from them but learning from research others have done before about human capabilities, limitations, the way people perceive and think. Once you have that user research, we're going to move into part two, which is design. How do you go from an idea of what problem you're trying to solve to, first quickly, and then perhaps in more fleshed-out detail, sketches and prototypes of the idea for how you're going to address that solution? We'll take you through the design process, both the quick part where you come up with lots of designs quickly and the refinement as you start fleshing out a design. Third, how do we evaluate those interfaces and most importantly improve them? Design as we teach it to you as a process. It's an engineering process. It involves getting something out there, critiquing it, both critiquing it with your own expertise and the expertise of others including your users. And then making it better until you finally have something that stops being so clunky and starts being more fluid. Finally we're going to wrap all of these pieces together with a Capstone Project. That Capstone Project is a group design project, because these kinds of designs are really done in groups in industrial practice. Where you'll take on a challenge and a group of you together will learn about the users, apply your design ideas, do the evaluation, and present a final design along with the report on its rationale and what you've learned in the evaluation along the way. And when you're done with all of that you will be introduced into the wonderful field of user interface design. So, one last word: who is this specialization for? I should say, we've been teaching user interface design collectively over the past 24 years. I taught my first course in it 24 years ago. Loren here joined me, already now this is going back 14 years, and the rest of the team here has been teaching it in recent years, and we continue teaching it forward. We found this course works very well for people who are interested in building computer systems, computer scientists, software engineers, people who are learning about information technology, but we've always brought in people who are interested in designing and specifying systems who are going to work with implementors. That includes people who come from domains where these systems are important. In health care, in education, in finance, but also people who have come in from schools of design, people who have come in just out of general curiosity. This course series and Capstone do not require that you program. They require that you be willing to work hard in design, that you talk to people, that you observe. We will by the end refer you out if you're interested in also doing the programming, to a number of excellent courses that can help you learn the specific programming skills that you can match with your design to turn it into an executing reality. So, we welcome all of you and why don't we move on next into what makes this course unique and I'm going to turn this over to Loren. >> Now, even though you don't need to program for this course, we expect that many of you do have a computer science background. And if you think back to your classes you've had in computer science or software engineering, a lot of those courses are about building software systems right. And what does right mean? It means things like a fishing code, elegantly designed, well-structured in modularized, maintainable, things like that. Those are very important things, that is not the focus here. It is not the focus of user interface design, particularly this course, sequence of courses. Instead what the focus is here is on building the right software. What do we mean by the right software? We mean software that actually solves real problems that people have that does something that people want to do and that is actually usable and we hope even enjoyable for our people to use. So that's the distinction between traditional computer science courses many of you may have had and this course. And now, let's hear a few words from Lana about sort of the nature of this field. >> Another thing that makes this different from other computing fields is its interdisciplinary nature. So as you can see here on the slides, there are a lots of relevant disciplines that contribute to the field of human computer interaction user interface design. And in fact, if you were to Google user interface design disciplines, and look at the images you'll see lots of other takes on the different Venn diagrams that contribute to the field depending on who's making them. So here I kind of tried to summarize it through three related fields. So, some fields focus on understanding humans: Social science, psychology, linguistics, anthropology, communication, all these things contribute to understanding humans. Now, once you understand humans you may want to know how to design for them. So there's lots of fields that contribute to design of technology so whether its interaction design, industrial design, graphics or even arts like media arts for example that may contribute to the content that goes into the system. And finally, you may be interested in actually building the technology. Building out the designs that come from this process and that's where computer science comes in, related fields like robotics, and different forms of engineering depending on the kind of system that you're building. Now HCI work happens in all of these categories, but it's particularly valuable at the intersections of these categories. So when people from design and technology come together, when people who understand humans come with people who are trying to build the technology to support them. And I think that's what's really unique about this field, is this interdisciplinarity of it. >> So, why starting using user interface is important? Designing a user interface is not that simple and intuitive like many people might think. One common mistake interface designers and developers make is assuming that the users think like they do. However, the fact is that this is often not the case. You are not your users. As a designer and developer of the interface, you know your interface inside and out. You know everything about your interface, you know the interface even when it was just a few sketches on a napkin and you know that every iteration that interface has been through. However, many of your users are coming to your site or using your product for the very first time. A little confusion might just leave them feel that they are dissatisfied, they're angry, they are frustrated, and even abandon your product. The problem of you are not your users are even more significant when we are designing product or software for the elderly, for the children, for the people from very different culture, for the people with disabilities. >> Yeah Haiyi, I think that's exactly right. I taught this course the first time, last semester here at the University of Minnesota. And in the introductory lecture, I made some of the points that we've been making here. And it was very clear to me that a lot of my students, many of whom had a strong computer science background, had this experience of putting their blood, sweat, and tears into building a website or a mobile app or these types of things. They think they have the next big startup, these types of things. And then, disappointment comes crashing in because while they thought they had a great application, their intended users didn't agree, right? They didn't ask the users beforehand, didn't employ many of the techniques we'll be teaching in this class. So, I was surprised at how easy it was to convince many of these very technical people how important it is to adopt some of these interdisciplinary techniques to adopt some of these techniques that require you to go talk to a lot of people all the time and they really bought in quite easily. >> Well, one example of this that is certainly a commercial success everybody knows is Apple. My first experience with Apple was the Apple 2 line which no one would claim was easy to use. The fact was it didn't do lower case text and they said if you wanted to do lowercase text, you could solder a cable from the shift key into the joystick port and bring in lowercase text yourself. It was a machine for hackers. It was actually a wonderful machine for hackers. But I also watched Apple as the years went by with the Macintosh. And that Macintosh was a brilliant design. Parts of it that had come out of Xerox, parts of it that were then refined further by Apple with teams that included social scientist and experts on people. That led to Apple having this amazing reputation of for ease of use. And those of you who were around at the time when everyone was wondering, "well what's next?" And Apple probably should have started to fail because Microsoft and others started catching up. Realize that, that reputation Apple had for being user centered, sustained the company right up until the point where it came back with the iPod and the iPhone and these other new devices that still feel like they were just natural to pick up and use. And this is a company that at various times is been the most valuable company in the world as a result because they've had a relentless focus on making this experience something that's pleasurable and comfortable. >> And it makes me think, too, natural and easy to use is just not easy. We've heard some of our colleagues in places like Microsoft say as they've started to try to be more systematic and data-based about the decisions they make, that they'll have their design teams members make guesses as to which of these particular interface techniques users will prefer, which feature is best, which font, which color. And these are experienced people and they can't get it right. Even their intuitions are not sufficient. So they need to have good processes, good methods and good evaluation in order to make things that people can actually use. >> I think this is particularly important when working with users who are very different from you. I've done a lot of work with kids and I never fail to be surprised. I kind of take my first step at a problem. I have my first intuition about what might be important to children in a particular system. And yet they always kind of surprise me with what they actually prefer and what they want to do. It's only working with them that I begin to understand what are the challenges that they face? What are their priorities? What are their motivations in this problem? And you were saying something? >> Yeah, I was just going to mention, in a couple of videos you guys will see all of us run down a list of very famous success stories of design and very famous or I should say infamous failures. And this failure include cases where people died, billions of dollars were lost, companies' reputations were irreparably damaged, these types of things, so, in terms of value for your time, this is just an incredibly important subject matter to study in my view, and I'm sure in your views as well. So if that discussion didn't convince you as to the importance of this particular material, we thought these next couple of slides might do that. What you're seeing here is a listing of Google's current job openings in this area. You'll see just tons and tons and tons and tons of listings. It's not just Google. Here's Facebook's list. There's 51 current openings in the domain that you're going to be learning about in the specialization. And then here's Microsoft with hundreds, right? This is not only an area that's important, many prominent companies recognize how important it is and are hiring extensively in this area. >> And it isn't just down in the trenches. There's so much interesting stuff going on, but there's a really strong professional and research community around the area as well. There's many professional societies including the User Experience Professional Association or UxPA, the Interaction Design Association, IxDA. And then coming out of the computing area where we all come from, there's the Association for Computing Machinery, and its special interest group on Computer-Human Interaction or SIGCHI. Most of us are heavily involved with this. It's about 4,000 members of the organization. And one of the things that SIGCHI does is sponsor a bunch of professional conferences where researchers and practitioners from around the world get together to discuss new ideas that they're developing, share stories of success and failures and learn from each other. SIGCHI has about over 20 conferences every year. They're held around the world, and recently over 9,000 people have been participating in these conferences. So, our flagship conference is the CHI Conference. Now, as you'll see, this map shows where some of the conferences sponsored by the special interest group on computer-human interaction are happening over the next few years. Many in North America and Europe, as well as an increasing number in Asia and moving to other areas like Africa and Latin America as well. Now as a sign of the interest and growing interest in this area, the CHI Conference. This is the leading research and practitioners' conference in the field. It's been increasing in participation for the last decade. Used to be ten years ago, it was about 2,000 to 2,500 people and recently, it's moved up to being 3,000 to 3,500 people. So a great deal of professional research interest in this field as well, and it isn't just in places like North America. This slide shows participation in one of the most recent CHI conferences by country. Lots of people from the United States, in this case lots of people from South Korea, China, Japan, Germany. Many other European and Asian countries, so it's really a vibrant, growing, and international field. >> So I wanted to talk a little bit about how I got into this field >> Yeah, I did my under graduate in computer science in a very traditional computer science program at the University of Maryland. And as I was thinking about all of these kind of technical questions about how to write good code about how to connect with data bases about how to think about your data, and how you handle it. I was kind of feeling increasingly frustrated by the fact that I felt that all of these things, I was learning I wasn't really applying to real problems and real challenges that people face in the field. And all of that changed when as a junior I took my first human computer interaction class. In that class, one of the challenges that we were posed with was designing technology for the elderly. We were trying to design an ebook reader that the elderly could use. And this was way before Kindle, not to age myself. But it was significantly before Kindle that we were working on this project. And I remember thinking, I think we can do this. Here's kind of what I think it should look like and all of our kind of sketches, all of our ideas really changed when we started to actually talk to people who were elderly, who were living in assisted care, and who were able to provide us with a lot of insight about what the design should be like. It was very different for me to see the ideas come not just from my own head, but also integrate kind of my own intuitions as a designer with what users brought to me by telling me about their challenges and their motivations, and what they wanted to get out of the project. In the end, I was able to see that this field let me as a computer scientist have this opportunity to make a change in the world and change individual lives by creating technology. It really was something that really changed the trajectory of my career. And I hope this course is as influential for you as it was for me. >> So I think like you Lana, I have a similar story where I didn't go into college thinking that I would study HCI. In fact, my background is in both computer science and geography. I have a very traditional computer science degree from a liberal arts college right near here actually. As well as a geography degree, and I was just fascinated with both of them. I decided to pursue geography at the next level as I thought it addressed some of the most important problems in the world, and what I learned in my two years in geography and getting a Master's Degree was, you know what, I think geography does address some of the most important problems of the world. But how you address those problems, that's getting computers to understand humans and helping humans understand computers. And so, that led me back into computer science to get my degree. in computer science, like my PhD in computer science and HCI has created a great deal of professional satisfaction for me in getting to teach this stuff and research it as well. >> Yes, similar to Lana and Brent, I also had a traditional computer science undergraduate degree. And during, while I was an undergraduate student, I became more interested in those large-scale online social technical systems like Wikipedia and Facebook. So I was wondering like what are the underlying principles of this large scale sort of technical system? How can we make this systems better, more efficient, more productive, and if we want to design new technical systems, social technical systems from scratch. What can we do? So with these questions, I went Carnegie Mellon University to pursue my PhD degree, and now I'm still working on these areas here at the University of Minnesota. >> I too came to this field a little late. I did a classic computer science undergraduate degree. Wrote grad school is how I wanted to work on parallel programming languages. And in my first year of grad school took a course on what was then thought of as user interfaces, and it was all about user interface technology. How to build the toolkits that put the menus and the scrollbars on the screen. And I actually did a dissertation on user-interface technology where we built a tool kit that had exactly one user, and we were really frustrated that we had one user. Because with no users, we wouldn't have had to support it. >> [LAUGH] >> And with one user we had to support it and had no fame whatsoever. And when I became a faculty member, I realized that the people I was seeing in the user interface technology conference were all also getting together at this CHI conference, so I figured I'd better go there too. And it opened up this world of, wait a minute, if you start thinking about the humans first, you can do these interesting and powerful things, and I got hooked on that. I built on a bit of psychology background I had had from school and started shifting what I did from technology first to building technology in support of things that made sense to humans. And I've been happy with that ever sense. >> Well I think I zig-zagged a little bit to get to human-computer interaction and user interface design. When I went to college, I had no idea about computer science. I was going to be a political science major and go to law school. And for whatever reason, I decided pretty quick that wasn't the right path for me, and so I got into computer science. And I wasn't quite sure what I was going to do with it, and then my senior year in college I sort of discovered linguistics, and I thought this is really cool. We can actually even have computers try and understand language. So I went to grad school to do AI and natural language processing and I thought well we'll teach computers to understand language. And I thought that meant understand sentences, and it didn't take too long to realize, well first of all that was really hard. And it's even hard for people and one of the things that we do is we don't just understand sentences, we have conversation, we have dialogue, we go back and forth. So I got into that area and it didn't take me too long to realize interaction involves a lot of things. In order to succeed at interaction between people and computers, maybe the right way to think of it isn't just that computers should understand language and produce language. It's a perfectly fine thing to do, but we should think more generally about what computers are good at, what people are good at, and how to create systems such that the system, the people and the computer together, can work more effectively. And that's an approach I've always been interested in ever since. And also as soon as I sort of hit that perspective what was really interesting is I felt like I could work on real problems, problems that really matter. And that's what excites me as well about this discipline. >> So if we're going to spend the next twenty or so weeks together, it seems like you should know a little a bit about us and maybe even a few things that you would've learned if we were face-to-face in the classroom spread out over time. So I'm going to actually ask everyone here to say just a few things that you might not know about us that will help explain when, over the course of the videos that follow, we might appear to be a little, well I guess the polite word would be quirky. [LAUGH] And so, why don't we just start with Lana to my right, we'll come around the circle, I'll go last. >> All right. Well what can I say about myself? I was born in Moscow, Russia and in fact from time to time during the course I may be whipping up my Russian accent which many people find quite amusing. But I actually spent most of my childhood in Belarus and then my family immigrated to the United States when I was ten years old. Let's see, something fun about myself, well, one thing that people find unusual is that I'm kind of obsessed with Legos. So, every time I accomplish a big work task, like for example, submitting a grant, which is something that professors have to do a lot of, I buy myself a Lego set, because I think that's really the best reward for a task done, is a new Lego set to explore. How about you, Brent? Something fun about yourself? >> I'll start out with where I was born, like you. So a much more boring origin story. I grew up in the San Francisco Bay area, right outside of Berkeley. It's been interesting to see that area shift a lot as I've grown older. In terms of fun stuff about me, as you can see, I have a somewhat alternative appearance. There are seven of these. I often get that question. There used to be a lot more. Maybe try to find some pictures of that on the internet. And let's see. I like to travel a lot, and hopefully I've been to your home country. And Loren this is my latest fun thing, Loren and I recently did some research on emoji that was featured both on National Public Radio which is our very distinguished public radio network as well as in Teen Vogue which is a magazine for I think young women between 14 and 18 so that's definitely a first for me. [LAUGH] >> Good, good. Well, I guess I get to do my origin story now. I was born in South Dakota, a small rural town, actually. And I grew up on a farm, and that's where I lived until I went to college. And what else? More origin story stuff. What do I like to do? I guess a couple things I like to do. My family and I like to watch Marvel movies. So the ones with Iron Man, Captain America, all those people and so we watch those a lot. And take pictures of my cats, believe it or not, and post them on the internet. >> [LAUGH] >> About my story, I grew up in China. My home town is Sujo, it's a city near Shanghai. One fun fact about myself, so while we are collectively preparing for the birth to this specialization, I'm also preparing for my first baby. >> Which is quite a specialization in and of itself. So I grew up in New York, New York. And actually was born in the hospital across the street from where I went to high school. Two sort of interesting pieces of trivia. One, I'm an avid poker player. And so if I come to your hometown and there's a place you can play poker, the odds are you'll find me there some free evening. The other is I own an almost limitless collection of blue shirts, which in the first MOOC that I did, was apparently a topic of great discussion as to does he own any other shirt? And I had to clarify that yes I do I own 12 of this exact shirt. And I'm very happy buying in bulk because I have no sense of fashion. But really, the one thing I want to make sure to close with is, I have about the world's greatest job. I work with an amazing team of people that is just incredibly accomplished. You will see, as we go through, that the name GroupLens either as GroupLens Research or the GroupLens Center For Social and Human-Centered Computing, they all refer to the lab that we lead together where we have about two dozen of students and a handful of staff to work in areas of social computing and human-computer interaction. And it’s just been amazing over the more than 20 years of this lab to see the work that we've done featured on the evening news, the New York Times, public radio, to see the people involved interviewed in in all of the places you can imagine, radio, book tours, start up companies and some really impressive software systems. I'm not going to brag about all of the things. If you want to know what we do, you can go to grouplens.org and see a glimpse of that. But I will brag for a moment about the quality of people we've been able to attract. We have some phenomenal students, but really, more than anything else, I have a bunch of phenomenal colleagues. Several of them have joined our group recently and they are the reason that we decided it was time to come together and create this specialization for you. They're also really nice people that we enjoy working together. We're going to enjoy working together with Brent even when he heads southeast to Northwestern and >> [LAUGH] >> if you don't have a geography degree, that may not make a lot of sense to you, >> [LAUGH] >> but it's true. And we think we're going to have a wonderful time with you over the next 20 or so weeks. And so, we look forward to spending that time together, and we'll promise we'll keep the videos a little shorter than this introduction, and maybe even a little less emotional as we go through. But we're going to launch right in with the structure and then the content of user interface design. We look forward to seeing you there.
