User-Centered Web Site Development: A Human-Computer Interaction Approach

Don McCracken is Professor of Computer Science at City College, CUNY, and the author of more than 20 textbooks in computer science. He is a past president of ACM and the 1992 recipient of the ACM SIGCSE Award for Outstanding Contributions to Computer Science Education.

Rosalee Wolf is Professor of Computer Science at the School of Computer Science, Telecommunications and Information Systems of DePaul University, where she was the first Director of the HCI program and was instrumental in creating the first bachelor’s program and the second master’s program in HCI in the United States. A -former NASA fellow, she leads the groundbreaking American Sign Language project at DePaul.

This text combines an introduction to human-computer interaction (HCI) with an exposition of website development.

No one today needs convincing that the World Wide Web is a major phenomenon. Students are surely convinced, and they desire instruction in developing websites, but they usually see the subject in terms of writing HTML and of associated implementation tools. They often undervalue what the established field of HCI has to contribute to a good website.

This book is intended for such a student and for anyone else who wants to build effective interfaces between people and computers.

Goal

The goal of any course based on the book is to enable students to develop interfaces that are usable: they permit the user to find what he or she wants, find it quickly, and carry out any interaction effectively and efficiently. This goal has much broader applicability than the World Wide Web, of course. But with the Web being pervasive and of much interest to students, we chose to build our presentation around the Web.

Most of today’s software is interactive, and most of our graduates will be called upon to write front ends or other interactive software as part of their jobs. People who have mastered the material in this book will be able to do a much better job of interaction design than they could without that knowledge. They will also be better prepared to work with HCI and website development experts in an industrial team setting.

Topics Covered

The order of presentation of the topics was given a great deal of thought, with revisions based on teaching experience. Details may be seen in the Table of Contents. Here is an overview:

• The first eight chapters build a solid foundation of HCI concepts and practice as outlined in the ACM SIGCHI’s Curricula for Human-Computer Interaction. Topics include human perception, user and task analysis, content organization, visual organization, navigation, prototyping, and evaluation.
• The next six chapters are devoted to issues specific to website development: color, typography, multimedia, accessibility, globalization, and trust.
• A generous appendix presents an expository introduction to XHTML and Cascading Style Sheets. All formatting, after a first few examples, is done with Cascading Style Sheets, which has numerous advantages that are explained in the text.

Support for Instructors

The many review questions and exercises are a major feature of the book. The review questions help a student master the principles. But, as with sports, playing a musical instrument, or software engineering, a student learns to apply HCI principles to website development by doing it. You can’t learn to swim simply by listening to lectures, and you can’t learn user-centered development that way either. The way to learn is to take an assigned design task, carry it through, then compare one’s work with that of other students under the guidance of the instructor. A model solution can be most helpful if presented after the students have tried to do it on their own.

This raises the always challenging issue of how an instructor should grade this type of project, especially if the instructor has limited experience in teaching the subject. Our response is an extensive Instructor’s Manual. It contains suggestions for applications, ranging from short assignments to term-long projects, plus model solutions in the form of some of the best student work we have encountered in our teaching. The Instructor’s Manual also contains tips for teaching and grading, sample syllabi, and sample exams.

The book has a companion website at http://www.prenhall.com/mccracken_wolfe . It contains links to illustrations in the text, URLs for simplicity in following links in the text, and other materials. A password-protected site contains the Instructors Manual and a set of PowerPoint slides for each chapter.

The bibliography for each chapter lists all literature cited in the text. These sources are both industrial and academic. Citations of relevant sources accompany design rules and guidelines as they appear in the text.

Classroom Tested

To practice what we preach, the book and supporting materials have been thoroughly use tested. Over a period of 18 months, several drafts of this book have been test-taught to approximately 1000 students at eight colleges and universities. Feedback from students and instructors has been instrumental in shaping the topic coverage and pedagogical strategy.

How to Use This Book

This organization permits great flexibility in how a course based on the text is structured. A prerequisite knowledge of Web-page authoring can be assumed or not. A prepublication version of this book has been taught successfully, using Web examples, both to students having no background in website development and to students who have extensive Web development experience.