Readings

There is a lot of reading for this course. I have carefully chosen books and articles that are relatively well written and aimed at a more general audience. There is a whole literature on the research aspects of Human Computer Interaction, Cognitive Psychology and Software Engineering. But I think you have enough on your plate without having to learn the jargon and the background understanding to fully understand that body of work. Let's save that for an advanced course.

I also expect that in pursuing the topics of interest to you that you will do some additional background reading. What you choose to read depends on both the topic and the information sources available to you within the time constraints of the course.

Most readings are available online. I will include links to them. Many are accessible from the ACM Digital library. To gain access to this, you have to go in via the special UIUC entrance so that you can be authenticated as a UIUC student.
In addition, certain readings are available from the GSLIS library electronic reserves.
In addition you need the two books below.

The tentative schedule for the readings
 

Recommended Texts

You really need these two:

Usability Engineering
Jakob Nielsen (1994) Academic Press ISBN 0125184069

The Trouble With Computers : Usefulness, Usability, and Productivity
Thomas K. Landauer (1996) MIT Press ISBN: 0262621088

Additional Books

If you are very keen and interested, these are also well worth reading:

Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity
Jakob Nielsen (1999) New Riders Publishing; ISBN: 156205810X

Tog on Software Design
Bruce Tognazzini (1995) Addison-Wesley ISBN: 0201489171

Tog on Interface
Bruce Tognazzini (1992) Addison-Wesley ISBN: 0201608421

The Design of Everyday Things
Donald A. Norman (1990) Currency/Doubleday; ISBN: 0385267746

Designing Web Usability : The Practice of Simplicity
Jakob Nielsen (2000) New Riders Publishing. ISBN: 156205810X

Usability Engineering: Scenario-Based Development of Human-Computer Interaction
Mary Beth Rosson & John M. Carroll (2001) Morgan Kaufmann. ISBN: 1558607129

Online resources

Task-Centered User Interface Design: A Practical Introduction
Clayton Lewis and John Rieman
This is an online shareware book. It can be accessed from
ftp://ftp.cs.colorado.edu/pub/distribs/clewis/HCI-Design-Book

We will be looking at various readings from the Journal "IEEE Software". This is also accessible via the University of Illinois Digital Library. This will allow you to see the figures in colour.

We will also be looking at various articles from a journal called "interactions". This journal is published by the ACM and is well worth reading. We now have an online subscription to the ACM Digital Library. This is accessible directly or via the LIS Library Express Links web page . Note that you have to go via that web page (click on 'ACM') so that the ACM know that you are part of UIUC. If you are using a non-UIUC networked machine, you will have to provide your UIUC netid and password. Note also that once in the ACM DL, "interactions" is filed under "magazines". Great usability, huh?

We will be looking at a whole bunch of resources on the web.
More on this later, but in case you are interested or want to get a feel for what the course is about, here are some of them:

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/
http://www.indiana.edu/~iirg/ARTICLES/usability/usability.main.html
http://info.med.yale.edu/caim/manual/

http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january97/retrieval/01shneiderman.html
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/february96/02vanhouse.html

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