I320U, App Proto Studio App Prototyping Studio

The syllabus is the course’s main document. Expect it to be followed to the letter.

A grid view of our schedule shows, week by week, what the designers and the developers each do, along with what is assigned, what is due, and what to read.

Lectures

01Intro opens the course with a design thinking exercise run in pairs, working through the EDIPT stages from interview to prototype, and covers the syllabus.

02Sketching covers lofi prototyping and sketching, including storyboards and their notation, ideation and how might we statements, diverging and converging, and system diagramming.

03Teaching is about teaching design to developers, tracing user centered design from waterfall to iterative practice and then examining where UCD and Agile conflict and combine, with attention to culture, teams, and roles.

04Elements describes four elements of hifi prototyping: color, typography, layout, and animation, including the CSS box model, layout primitives, and composition over inheritance.

05StoryMapping introduces user story mapping as a way to build shared understanding, then turns to scenarios, how they differ from storyboards, and a storyboarding exercise in Figma.

06MoodBoards covers mood boards — what goes in one and why — along with sources of design inspiration and a crazy eights sketching exercise.

07Microinteractions discusses microinteractions for engagement, system status, error prevention, and brand, then introduces pair designing with its generator and synthesizer roles.

08ClientTime discusses clients and stakeholders, drawing on Greever (2020): what makes a design good, why communication is the job, and how to apply UX principles to the people you report to.

09aFormative explains usability testing in depth: formative versus summative, testing lofi prototypes, amateur and professional approaches from Krug and Barnum, expert and user based methods, how many participants to recruit, measurement, analysis, reporting, validity, and a closing look at AI in evaluation.

09bSummative surveys summative testing services, working through UserTesting.com methods — five second tests, card sorting, tree testing — and the FuelCycle user research process.

10Culture asks what culture is and why it matters to technology, using color as an example of cultural difference.

11BadUX examines bad UX through a gallery of failures: doors, dryers, iPads, elevators, hotel showers, and the risks of flat design.

12VibeCoding goes beyond vibe coding, looking at what designers can do with code using Cursor, Claude Code, and Figma.