6.S063 Design for the Web: Languages and User Interfaces

General information

• Lectures are Monday and Wednesday, at 2:30 - 4pm (3-333). Mandatory studio on Fridays, at 1:30 - 3pm or 3:30 - 5pm (E25-117).

  • Live Monday lecture
  • Wednesday “lecture” is essentially pre-reading material. It will often be pre-recorded, and the link distributed in advance. It will also be played in-class, with a member of staff to answer questions. You can watch it asynchronously, or come to lecture, so you can ask questions. Some of these may be live lectures (announced in advance), but attendance will never be mandatory.
  • Live lectures will be recorded, but a part of your grade is participation (see below)

• Office Hours

  • Monday 4:30-6:00PM with Barish and Nathan at 32-G5 (Stata Center, Gates Tower, 5th floor Commons Area, right outside the elevator). Also on Zoom at mit.zoom.us/j/93790805224.
  • Tuesday 4:00-6:30PM with Leo and Ivy at 32-G5 (Stata Center, Gates Tower, 5th floor Commons Area, right outside the elevator)
  • Wednesday, Friday 5:00-7:00PM on Zoom: mit.zoom.us/j/2153972930

• 12 units (3-0-9)

• 6.101 (ex 6.009) or equivalent experience programming is a co-requisite

• Enrollment may be limited

• Fill in the signup form, otherwise you are not properly registered for the course!!

Course description

This course will teach the principles and technologies for designing usable user interfaces for the Web.

We will learn the key principles and methods of user interface design, including learnability, efficiency, safety, prototyping, and user testing. We will learn the core web languages of HTML, CSS, and Javascript, their different roles, and the rationales for the widely varying designs. We will use these languages to create usable web interfaces. We will also touch on the fundamentals of graphic design theory, as design and usability go hand in hand.

Changes from last year

Spring 2023 is the third time this course is offered. Students in the two previous iterations were generally very positive about the course content, but found the workload heavy, even after it was reduced in 2022. Therefore, this year we have decided to make the following changes:

• We will reduce the workload very significantly (up to 60% depending on the assignment).
• We will be replacing Mavo with VueJS (+ helpers), to provide students exposure to an industry-standard framework.
• Instead of 2 lectures per week, we are converting one lecture into "pre-reading", i.e. a recording watched asynchronously, but also played in class with a member of staff to answer questions. Students are free to choose whether they attend this or watch the recording in their own time.

Course logistics

Grading

• Weekly assignments will account for 75% of your grade.
• There is no exam, midterm, or longer project (though there are smaller projects that are built over several homework assignments).
• 25% of your grade comes from participation, broken down as follows:
  • 15% for studio attendance and participation.
  • 5% for submitting homework feedback
  • 5% for general participation. Some live lectures will include in-class activities that will count towards your participation grade, but you can also boost your participation through other means, such as asking & answering questions, or helping other students on Piazza.
• Getting a perfect participation grade does not require perfect attendance/participation.
• We will put participation requirements in abeyance during COVID spikes, and will make accommodations for student(s) isolating.

Lateness and extensions

To give you some flexibility for periods of heavy workload, minor illness, absence from campus, job interviews, and other occasional (but often predictable) circumstances, you may use limited extensions on problem set deadlines, called slack hours. Each slack hour is a 1-hour extension on the deadline. You have a budget of 5 × 24 slack hours for the entire semester, which you may apply to any combination of individual assignments. Using any part of a slack hour consumes the entire hour. E.g. uploading an assignment 62 minutes late uses up 2 slack hours. You can use at most 36 slack hours (1.5 days) for a given assignment. Assignments more than 36 hours late will not be accepted. Individual assignments or exercises may have different terms about how many slack hours (if any) are allowed. Slacks are not to support random procrastination. Late submissions should only occur in exceptional circumstances (conference travel, illness, etc.). Slacks just avoid the hassle of submitting a justification. If you exhaust your slacks and seek further extensions, you will first need to provide acceptable justifications for all the slacks you used.

All special circumstances extension requests must be documented by an authoritative note (e.g. doctor's note) or photographic evidence (e.g. selfie of you holding your smashed laptop).

Textbook and resources

• Recommended textbook: The Design of Everyday Things: Revised and Expanded Edition, Don Norman
• MDN Web Docs
• CSS specifications
• HTML specification
• Javascript (ECMAScript) specification

Collaboration policy

• Covered in detail here.