This text combines an introduction to Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) with an exposition of Web site development.

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

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

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:

This organization permits great flexibility in how a course based on the text is structured. Choices are available in two major matters:

A preprint of the HCI portion of the manuscript has been test-taught in abridged from at City College of New York, and in full at DePaul University. In the latter case it was used as the text for six sections of introductory HCI courses. (About 500 students a year took an introductory HCI course at DePaul in 2001, a majority of them non-majors in HCI.) A preprint of parts of the Web site development portion has been taught at City College of New York. A preprint of the HCI portion and the XHTML appendix has been taught at Gonzaga University and at the University of North Carolina at Asheville.

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. The lessons learned will carry over to students’ work in any other area of human-computer interaction.

Does it need to be said that many interfaces are not usable today? Let us say it briefly. Researchers report findings like these:

These and many other problems cause lost sales, wasted time, and needless frustration. In some applications a bad interface can risk human safety or even life.

It doesn’t have to be that bad. Principles of HCI and Web site development are known and they can be learned by ordinary undergraduates.

This book will not make anyone an expert in HCI or Web site development. Both are large subjects, with tens of thousands of references in complete bibliographies. However, most of the 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 Web site development experts in an industrial team setting.

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 Web site development by doing it. You can’t learn to swim simply by listening to lectures, and you can’t learn Web site 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. In briefest outline, this is the studio method, as it has been used for decades—if not centuries—in art and architecture education.

This raises the always-challenging issue of how the instructor can grade studio projects, 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, and with model solutions in the form of some 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 Instructor's Manual will be available when the book is.

The book will have a companion Web site containing regularly updated teaching material including more student work, PowerPoint slides, new and revised URLs related to text references, updates to the bibliography, and various other things. Answers to all review questions and exercises will be available to instructors.

The bibliography lists all literature cited in the text as well as other standard and some specialized works. A "survival kit" lists half a dozen books that the instructor new to HCI might find useful in preparing to teach the subject for the first time.

Our sources for the content of the book are diverse. We have consulted—and cite—the standard reference works. We peruse the periodical literature and real Web sites, and cite our sources. These sources are both industrial and academic. We are both academics, but the reader need not be concerned about any ivory tower effect: Real-world experience is reflected in the content and presentation. Jared Spool, one of the top usability consultants in the world, has said he will write a Foreword endorsing our approach.

We wish to express our appreciation for the support of the National Science Foundation, through grant DUE 0088184, which made the test-teaching and a careful evaluation effort possible. The grant is under the Educational Materials Dissemination part of the program in Course, Curriculum, and Laboratory Instrumentation. We are deeply grateful to the National Science Foundation and the reviewers of our proposal, for their backing of our approach, together with the endorsement of our conviction that more emphasis on HCI in undergraduate CS education is needed.

Thanks go to the people who test-taught the preprint: Stephanie Berger and Priscilla Lawyer at DePaul University; Susan Reiser at the University of North Carolina at Asheville; and Rob Bryant at Gonzaga University.

Daniel D. McCracken

New York

Rosalee J. Wolfe

Chicago

February 2002

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