Martin Stacey's Teaching Handouts
These are some handouts that I've produced for students taking particular courses,
that I've put here because they're useful to a wider variety of students.
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Formulating Research Questions for Development Projects
MSc projects need to be scholarly work that investigates research questions.
But most computing-related MSc projects are primarily about developing a software system or other usable artefact.
This document explains how to frame your development project as research by asking 'what can developing this system tell us?'
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Usability Factors
"Easy To Use" isn't any use as a definition of usability.
A large number of different factors influence how usable a computer system is,
and different purposes and situations require different trade-offs between them.
Here's a very incomplete list.
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Basic Principles of User Interface Design
A number of writers, most famously Jakob Nielsen and Ben Shneiderman, have produced
lists of design principles that user interfaces to interactive systems should follow.
This is a collection of lists of usability principles for design and evaluation of interactive systems.
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Types of Error
What kinds of errors do people make? What kinds of errors should interaction designers
anticipate and try to design out or mitigate? This document presents several different ways to
classify mistakes and slips; these classifications were developed for different purposes and are to
some extent complementary.
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Assorted Errors
A collection of brief descriptions of errors, mostly extracted from tweets submitted to
Errordiary.org, a collection of errors
gathered for a research project at University College, London. Most of these are action slips.
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Evaluating Web Pages
How good is a web site? For which users and purposes?
This is a set of issues to think about in considering how well a web site
meets its needs.
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Your First HTML Lab
I wrote down what I usually try to say to my students when they begin learning HTML
and producing their own web pages. (For Computer Science and Software Engineering students,
this was until 2017 the 'portfolio' part of CTEC 1412 Computer Ethics, Law and Portfolio.)
A collection of basic advice on how to get started and what pitfalls to avoid.
