The teaching gives students the ability to evaluate the usability of WEB pages and APP and design usable man-machine interfaces.
Concepts of ergonomics and rules of application of ergonomics to the design of WEB pages and APP will be theoretically explained and put in practice through workshop and group activities.

Lessons will give to the students the knowledge of ergonomics needed for the evaluation of usability of WEB pages and APP and for the design of usable man machine interfaces.

Lessons:

1 Quality, usability and ergonomics, examples of poor usability

2 User’s models and personas, user’s centered design, requirements, user cases, task and task/personas matrix

3 Usability testing and evaluation

4 ISO9241-10: the seven principles and examples, Norms and standards. Fundamentals of accessibility

5 Needs/artifact cycle, Design thinking, Lean Agile design approach and Prototyping

6 Visual perception and Gestalt and application to interface design

7 Theory and usage of colors

8 Designing for errors situations: errors prevention and errors management

9 Form design

10 Order, equilibrium and time. Haptics, sound and augmented reality

11 Usage of text: elements of typography, legibility and readability. 

12 Neuro and emotional design. The beauty of simplicity.

13 Final review of works done

We think that in order to work effectively designing WEB page and APP a basic knowledge of how it works under the cover may be very useful.   This basic knowledge will be given with 4 short lessons:

HTML/CSS
1 General introduction to HTTP protocol, a framework for code
2 Basic HTML 5 notions and language structure
3 Basic CSS 3 notions and language structure
4 Basic native iOS & Android interfaces notions

Practical activities:

1 Web site and APP usability analysis, benchmarking and redesign

This activity simulates a real word business situation.

An customer with a real WEB site and related APP will be assigned to each group of students.

We will imagine that the customer asks if WEB and APP are usable and how to correct errors and make them very usable.

The group will benchmark and analyze the WEB and the APP, perform formal evaluations and prepare a proposal for activities in the form of a presentation of the whole analysis and a proposal for the suggested modifications.

The table of content of the final work will be:

1 Our customer: activities, description and purpose of on line presence.

2 Identification of sites for benchmark, alike and akin.  Benchmark.

3 Personas, tasks and personas/tasks matrix

4 Heuristic analysis

5 Number of clicks analysis

6 Definition of analysis parameters, evaluation and comparison

7 “And so what” final slides with the whole analysis.

8 Proposals for pages modification in order to make the system more usable, design.

2 Curriculum vitae and portfolio

Each student will give evidence of having understood the basic concept of usability will prepare a Curriculum Vitae and a personal portfolio using Adobe Dreamweaver

None

The final evaluation will consist in a presentation of the job done: both usability analysis, benchmarking and redesign of our customer WEB and APP and the design of student's curriculum/portfolio.

For both some questions on the method applied and the motivations of the judgment and of proposed choices will be part of the final test.

refer to the part in english: On usability