2013 Online Course Wrap-up

Happy 2014! Want to learn something new? Try a free online course!

I've participated in several during the past year. What I've noticed is that online courses have different goals and different audiences depending on the source. Thus you'll get different things out of each one. Here's an overview of the courses I took. See what works for you.

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Heuristic Evaluation

One of the wonderful resources shared in Klemmer's HCI course are the articles by Nielsen Norman Group. Specifically, here are three we used to help us evaluate assignments during class. How to Conduct a Heuristic Evaluation discusses how to use a small set of people to examine an interface for usability issues with a list of criteria (heuristics) as an evaluation tool.

10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design presents some of the most general principles of interaction design. This list can be a good starting point for what to look for when evaluating an interface.

Severity Ratings for Usability Problems provides a way to prioritize the issues found with an interface.

Next up I'll be using these as guidelines as I search the web to find sites with usability issues.

Human-Computer Interaction course with Scott Klemmer

For anyone interested in learning UX I highly recommend taking Scott Klemmer's Human-Computer Interaction course from Stanford Online. It is one of the massive open (free) online courses available through Coursera. During April & May this year I participated in the third run of this class. I learned an incredible amount through the online videos, quizzes, assignments, peer-review and student interactions. If possible, set aside the 10-12 hours a week to complete the full studio track.

In the next posts I'll be putting into practice some of the things I learned and share some helpful resources. Enjoy!