Week 1: The One-Shot Interface, A Definition
What this course studies and why — the shape shared by parking meters, kiosks and ATMs, and the question generic usability heuristics don't ask
22 February 2027 incentive
Outline
- three interfaces, one shape: one-shot, captive, run by a stranger to the organisation that profits
- why this is a narrower claim than “bad interfaces exist” — most usability writing treats friction as an accident; this course treats it as a design decision with a beneficiary
- the question every week returns to: who benefits when this fails?
- what to bring to Assignment 1: a single transaction, described before it’s diagnosed
The argument
Every course on interface design starts from the same complaint: bad interfaces are common, and could be avoidably better. This course starts somewhere else. A parking meter, a check-in kiosk and an ATM are not badly designed by accident — they are built for a moment when the person standing at them cannot walk away, cannot ask a follow-up question, and will not use the machine again soon enough to build up a mental model of it.
Treating that as a fact about the situation, rather than a flaw in the interface, changes what counts as evidence: not “this was confusing” but “someone decided this could stay confusing, and it kept working for them.” That’s the claim this course tests, one machine a week, for twelve weeks — starting with the field notes you bring back from a parking meter, before you’re given permission to diagnose anything.
Question to carry: if nobody ever complains about a bad interface twice, who does that protect?
Teaching team
- Marisol Quaye — convenor