>From David Little
> I'm currently studying on the OU course M873,
> User Interface Design and Evaluation
<snip>
>
> One of the complaints I'd have about it is
> that the examples are quite old as the course
> last seems to have been revised around 2000.
Correct. I'm not involved in this course any more, but the OU web site tells
me that its last presentation will be in May 2009. I don't know whether
there are any plans to replace it.
When we created the textbook from the course ("User Interface Design and
Evaluation", Stone, Jarrett, Woodroffe and Minocha, 2005), we refreshed a
lot of the screenshots etc but truthfully, it doesn't matter all that much.
The underlying principles are the same.
In the years when we were writing the course (1998-2000, roughly), we had to
fight hard to convince people that interaction design wasn't solely about
the web. That was going in the height of the dot com boom, of course. We
pointed out that people interacted all the time with all sorts of computers
that were nothing to do with the web, ranging from washing machines through
to the controls of a nuclear reactor. I think we were vindicated in
hindsight.
When editing the material into a textbook, the bit I found the hardest was
what to do about the chapter on designing for mobile. I ended up rewriting
the chapter to say (more or less): "this stuff changes all the time: get out
there and find out what mobile devices are like at the point that you're
actually designing for them".
> I'm taking this as a standalone course
> and I'm hoping it will make
> it easier to move into a usability
> / UI / IX etc. role (I'm
> currently a web developer).
> I'm not sure how useful the course will
> be in supporting this --
> how much do employers value these
> qualifications and is a course such
> as this sufficient on its own?
I'd be interested to hear from employers / hiring managers on this list what
they think. My instinct would be to say: a course helps, but it isn't going
to guarantee you a job. And you need to complement the academic stuff, which
is inevitably going to age a bit, with becoming conversant with the general
vibe on lists like this and reading relevant online zines like UX Matters, A
list apart, www.usabilitynews.com etc
As a minimum, I'd suggest that you should find a way of creating a portfolio
for yourself, whether by working on paid-for jobs, or doing some
moonlighting, or by helping out friends, family and worthy causes.
Best
Caroline Jarrett
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