Our designs don’t exist in a vacuum; no matter what kind of a designer you are, you will always be designing for an interface, whether that be web, mobile, or whatever we are using in 2050. If you’ve ever wanted a peek under the hood to see how all of these interfaces get implemented, then SSUI is the course for you.

What is SSUI?

SSUI (05-431/631) stands for Software Structures for User Interfaces. In this class, we dig into the software and hardware implementations of almost every user interface we interact with daily.

You start with the very basics: how we display pixels on a screen, how we manage each of those pixels to create content, and how we do user input. From there, you introduce people into the equation: managing uncertainty and mistakes, maintaining accessibility, and so on. As a SSUI student, you’ll embrace the nitty gritty details and try your hand at coding them up yourself.

How does SSUI apply to UX?

It is always good to gain exposure to the engineering side of UX, but there are two stand-out benefits to taking a class like SSUI as a UX-er.

1. Develop a shared language with your engineers and strengthen your gut sense of the expected effort of a change.

Good designers work with return on investment (ROI) in mind, and it’s advantageous to be able to understand what changes are high and low investment for the engineering team. ****Say we want to make a call to action more prominent on the screen. Changing the structure or layout of the CTA could be a high investment because it impacts everything else on the screen while bolding the text or changing the color would be a much lower lift to implement.

You’ll want to keep investment in mind when considering what your most strategic move is. Experience with interface implementation translates directly to sound ROI thinking, which is key to you defending your great ideas.

2. Build awareness of potential Whorfian Effects.

The Whorfian effect is the phenomenon where the current constraints of our environment influence how we innovate for the future. For example, we typically use our phones vertically, so content creators now default to vertical content.

In tech, the structure of our current interfaces makes some changes easier than others, and we often find ourselves following the path of least resistance when iterating. We are constantly designing for the future and it is essential to understand how previous work influences your current and next ideas. Coursework like SSUI’s will enable you to better understand when you are making the right design choice and when you are falling into a Whorfian trap.