PSYC 13
Designing for People Winter 2020

Cross-listed CSCI 13
This is not the current course catalog

Class Details

Many technologically-innovative and aesthetically-beautiful products fail because they are not sensitive to the attitudes and behaviors of the people who interact with them. The field of Human Factors combines aspects of psychology with software development, education, architecture, and physiology, and other fields, to design objects that provide an easy, enjoyable, efficient and safe user experience. The course will provide students with a theoretical framework for analyzing usability, as well as practical knowledge of a variety of human factors testing methodologies. The course will examine the usability of a wide variety of designed objects, including buildings, publications, websites, software applications, and consumer electronics gadgets. Students will demonstrate their understanding of human factors theory through a short paper and participation in class discussion. Students identify a usability problem and design a solution which they will evaluate by heuristic analysis and a usability test with 8-10 human test subjects. Findings will be presented on the final day. Adjunct Instructor Bio: Rich Cohen ’82 has designed communications, social networking and education applications used by over 100 million people and has conducted usability research on four continents.
The Class: Format: lecture
Limit: 15
Grading: pass/fail only
Requirements/Evaluation: short paper and final project or presentation
Prerequisites: none
Enrollment Preferences: Instructor seeks a diverse group of students with interests in design, psychology, and human-computer interaction
Materials/Lab Fee: none
Notes: This course is cross-listed and the prefixes carry the following divisional credit:
CSCI 13 PSYC 13

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