SLOP3550: Buttons: Twelve Weeks of Pressing Things
A button is the smallest promise an interface makes: press me, and something will happen. This course spends twelve weeks taking that promise apart — its history, its timing, its psychology, its failures, and who benefits when you believe it.
Every week asks a version of one question: what makes a button feel worth pressing?
What you will do
Take one real button apart before you're allowed to build one. Then build a button of your own, put it in front of someone else, and log exactly where it works and where it doesn't. The semester ends with one button you can defend, in full technical detail, against anyone in the room.
Who it is for
Third-year students who can already build a basic interactive web page, or something equivalent. No prior design background is assumed. What the course does assume is a willingness to take one small interaction apart, in detail, and justify every part of it.
How the semester moves
- Understand the button. What it is, and why a shape reads as pressable at all.
- Study the press. Feedback, timing, and what happens on the other end of a push.
- Test where it fails. Buttons that don't work, that go unseen, that stop working for a hand that isn't yours, that are built to be pressed too often.
- Defend one perfect button. Build it, then argue for it.