7th Entry

Fridays lecture was the last of the three usability lectures. We started with a brief recap examining the usability of Daniel’s shoe and why we bought it. The usability of his sock wasn’t up to much though since it had a hole in it!

After that we went onto this weeks main topic, evaluation. Evaluation is concerned with gathering information about the usability a design for a particular product by a specified group of users. This could involve getting the users to measure the usability of the product while using it a relative activity or specific environment.

Evaluation is carried out by companies for a number of reasons. Evaluation helps the company understand the real world by talking directly to the consumers finding out exactly what they want and how they are going to use the product. It is very easy to bypass the negative aspects of a design when you yourself have created it. Evaluation also gives companies the opportunity to compare designs so find out the positive and negatives of each product, find the ideal solution and compare that with their existing product. This way the company could design towards specific targets and standards, for example safety or accessibility standards.

An ideal way to evaluate is to different questions during different points of the design process. This is called formative evaluation. Another way you can evaluate is summative evaluation which is the evaluation of a finished system. This might not help the existing products usability but it is useful if a company wants to develop a similar product or upgraded in the future. It can be good for accessing the product so it can be finely tuned.

Qualitative evaluation is basically an evaluation carried out by the company on their own or any other product. Typically this type of evaluation is non numerical and may be subjective. It’s mainly done by direct observation, questionnaires and even interviews. This type of evaluation could be used to give the company detailed statistics.

These usability lectures have been really interesting but I can’t help thinking we’ve done usability to death now so I’m looking forward to moving on to something new next week. I will definitely come back to the notes I’ve made on usability if I ever need to test an application or product I have made.

At home I did a bit of research on the different types of evaluations which you can see in the links below at the bottom of this blog entry.

This week’s tutorial was about linking Flash frames. I’m really pleased we’ve moved back to Flash, much more interesting than usability checklists! It was also our first go at Action Script, something I had been dreading from day one but it actually wasn’t that bad. I was surprised that all you had to do was click the plus sign, click on the relevant item and the code would come up automatically. I know it must get a bit harder than that when you’re doing more advanced things but its good start! I had a few problems at first because I wasn’t selecting the right object to put the Action Script in but as soon as I noticed where I was going wrong it all went swimmingly. All in all a good introduction to Action Script.

1. Summative evaluation:

http://www.sil.org/linguaLinks/literacy/ReferenceMaterials/GlossaryOfLiteracyTerms/WhatIsSummativeEvaluation.htm

2. Qualitative evaluation

http://www.sil.org/lingualinks/literacy/ReferenceMaterials/GlossaryOfLiteracyTerms/WhatIsQualitativeEvaluation.htm

3. Formative evaluation

http://www.sil.org/linguaLinks/literacy/ReferenceMaterials/GlossaryOfLiteracyTerms/WhatIsFormativeEvaluation.htm

6th Entry

Today’s lecture was the second part to last weeks lecture on usability.

Most of the lecture went over and re-enforced what we had been taught last week but there were a few new key points.

We got shown a usability triangle with the sides labelled with three main areas a designer would need to consider for usability, effectiveness, satisfaction and efficiency. The system needs to be effective, needs to be able to satisfy the users requirements and be as efficient as possible.

Another diagram we looked at was one by Nielsen regarding system acceptability, which relates well to usability (1). As an overview, it says that the product must be socially acceptable and be practical. Making it socially acceptable shouldn’t be too difficult if you put a reasonable amount of thought into what the consumer wants but practicality is more complex and comes with more things you need to think about. I won’t go over each point since it’s quite simple to understand just by looking at the diagram but its important to notice that utility as usability are key factors of practical acceptability.

Both diagrams are really useful and can be used to evaluate products that already exist or you own ideas for a product. I couldn’t really say which one is best because they are both so important and deal with different issues, the triangle for usability and the other diagram for system acceptability. To get the best result you would have to use them both together. They are definitely the best diagrams I have come across while doing usability,

Finally we went on to experience levels. Everyone has a different experience level for different systems or, for example, computing as a whole where they can apply the knowledge gained from using other systems into new systems. The three experience levels we looked at were novice, intermittent and expert. Each user has different needs for the system. The novice is going to need some help with the system, they need to be able to clearly see what the need to do, receive clear feedback to what’s happening and receive lucid error messages when required. The intermittent user needs it to be clear and simple but would not appreciate it if help he or she does not need would slow them down. The expert user would like the system to be as simple and efficient as possible so they can complete their task as efficiently as possible. They would also want more powerful controls and maybe shortcuts such as keyboard shortcuts.

Overall this lecture has been really informative. The diagrams and experienced levels really add more depth to the subject of usability. I await the final usability lecture next week!

At home I had a look over a Wikipedia article on usability to get some additional insight into the subject (2).

The tutorial this week was basically the same thing as last week worded a bit differently. It seems like we’ve done usability to death now, especially in the tutorials.

For the first part we had to think of a task the user would want to perform on the Glamorgan website. I choose finding information about the computer forensics course. We then had to find ways the user might fail in this task. The Glamorgan website is well designed so the only nit pick, for example the search results were too long. We then got a partner to do the same thing but like I said, it was difficult to find much wrong with it, it would have been much better if we performed it on a website that wasn’t professionally designed, that way we would have got some decent results.

The results depended upon who you were paired with though. I personally found the site fine and so did my partner but if you get partnered up with a goth for example they might think the site is too white and could do with some more black (it could happen!) unbalancing the results unless you balance it out by asking more people.

Overall I completed the task in about 20 minutes and didn’t really learn anything that I didn’t learn in the two previous tutorials.

1. System acceptability diagram

http://www.euser-eu.org/Document.asp?MenuID=168

2. Usability article

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usability

5th Entry

The topic of this weeks lecture was usability, a very broad subject covering many areas of technology.

Almost every piece of technology we encounter has been designed with usability in mind. Designers have to think about how a user is going to interact with a piece of technology and what the actual purpose of the technology is if it benefits the user in the correct manor. Our lecturer used the example when you go to a cash machine you just want to get cash out, you don’t want to complete a level collecting notes like you might want to do in video games for example. The designers must always think about contingency because if a user can do something wrong, they probably will.

Different applications involve single use or multiple use, single user or group user, informing, teaching or entertaining, controlled environments or uncontrolled environments.

One good way of organising the thought process when designing these type of applications is to spilt it up into different sections. There are many different ways of doing this but one we focused on was called CUTS or context, user, task and system. Context consists of the why the user will be using the system and where he or she might be accessing it. User consists of the users physical attributes, mental capabilities and general technological skill level. Task is what the user hopes to achieve from using the system like the goals and end result whether that be physical or emotional (eg. games). System is what system the application will be running on, for example will it need multiple monitors, will they need to be touch screen.

The lecture was very informative and really made you think what questions had to be asking during the design process in making these applications. Its amazing how much technology has come one and how many new devices have entered our lives like the MP3 player. There are so many new technological innovations being thought out and designed and it has become a huge industry. I’ll definitely be coming back to this topic if I have to design anything that requires and user interaction. I look forward to the second part of the lecture next week!

The tutorial was similar to last weeks tutorial following on from usability and design of websites. Instead of being given another huge checklist we got given two links containing guidelines for web design to make websites more usable (links 1, 2). The first set of guidelines consisted of 292 page PDF document with each page dedicated to a design feature. Thankfully we only had to look at the homepage section. The second website was a short list listing only the fundamentals.

The guidelines were presented in a usable way, the key points were highlighted and were clearly visible. The guidelines are sensible to an extent. Using the 292 page PDF document in chapters one bit at a time would work well but users could get annoyed sifting though all 292 pages when they just want to get a quick and basic interpretation of how good their website is, but that’s when the shorter checklist can come in useful. I don’t believe however that there is a one size fits all set of guidelines. For example, the guidelines say that websites should display the contents on the front page, but this wouldn’t be appropriate for small websites. Also, for websites where some users will have vision problems, big clear text would be a high priority. You can’t just follow a set of guidelines to the book and expect to get a perfect website. The guidelines can be fantastic for creating ideas but you need to combine them with independent thought. This is the same for almost all guidelines, not just ones for making websites. If I ever needed to design a website but had no idea how to design a website, the first thing I would do is look at some guidelines to get some ideas.

1. Usability.gov website guidelines:

http://www.usability.gov/pdfs/guidelines.html

2. Ten Usability Heuristics:

http://www.useit.com/papers/heuristic/heuristic_list.html

4th Entry

The lecture was an overview of multimedia. A large subject covering text, clipart, graphics, animation, sound and video. In addition to this we also went over hypermedia and hypertext. While multimedia has been around for many years and is well established, hypermedia and hypertext are relatively new in comparison, only truly coming into their own with the advent of broadband. Hypermedia involves encyclopaedias, simulated micro worlds, expert systems and general learning systems. Hypertext involves electronic text, such as e-books and e-magazines.

We then looked at how this multimedia is produced and its different formats. We looked over text and how it is produced with ASCII, American Standard Code for Information Interchange.

Clipart is many found bundled with packages although some large clipart collections can be brought separately but seem to be becoming less and less common with the availability of images through the internet.

Graphics can come as raster, vector or bitmap. Bitmap files can be huge because it records the colour of every single pixel. These files can be compressed by other formats such as jpeg which looks at the general image and saves the relevant parts using them to calculate the rest of the image saving space. The difference between raster and vector is that you can resize vector as many times as you want and it will not get distorted while raster would.

Animation mainly comes gif, Flash, and Shockwave files. The animations that we create will start out as Flash files but can be converted to other formats to make them viewable in a web browser.

Digital sound mainly consists of mp3, wav and wma. Sound started out as wav which recorded all audio. MP3 offered compression by removing the sounds humans cannot hear, drastically reducing the file size. WMA offers a better form of compression allowing higher quality audio to be stored with less space. I’m not completely sure how it works differently but its good, trust me! Sound can be embedded in Flash as part of the animation file.

Digital video involves Quicktime, AVI and MPEG.

We then moved onto capturing media. Such as text capture, image capture with digital cameras and image processing, sound capture with microphones, and video capture with digital cameras.

The amount of file formats are definitely expanding which proves an added challenge for application developers to ensure their programs can interact with all the different file types.

To finish off the lecture we looked at the Cadburys advert with the gorilla on the drums to In the Air Tonight by Phil Collins. We first looked at the original and then a spoof someone had one where the music is replaced by the music to Eastenders. It showed us how animations can be easily changed by cutting parts out, repeating sections and adding music.

The lecture helped me understand the basic concepts of multimedia, and how it is used and how it can be used. I also understand the many file types used and an overview on how they work.

At home I had a look at a Wikipedia article on multimedia which gives a general overview of multimedia and its uses (4).

The tutorial was based on the usability of websites. We had a look at Glamorgan’s website and were asked questions based on its usability.

I found out that overall it is a very good website. The site is easy to use, has a very clean layout and is well ordered. One bad thing about it is that it takes a lot of clicks to find out details of a course. Instead of just using hyperlinks, a dropdown box could be used created a more compact menu system that could be incorporated into the front page of the site.

We then answered a usability checklist consisting of questions with boxes n/a, yes and no to tick. The list was huge! It would have taken me at least half an hour to complete. Some of the questions were hard to understand and it some were hard to judge given that only yes, no and n/a were provided. A one to five system would have been more appropriate. Also if the checklist had been more specialised, like separate ones for universities and businesses, it would have been a lot quicker and efficient to answer the questions. Questions could have also been rated for importance. For example easy navigation is more than including the date the website was last updated. The checklist was written in 1998 and so is out of date compared to the standards of today’s websites with multimedia playing a greater part now most people have high speed internet connections. The benefit of using a checklist is that you already have all the questions pre thought out and they are there in front of you but it can have a few disadvantages, not least in not being able to distinguish the best and worst feature of the site.

This tutorial was really useful helping me to understand what makes a good website. One key thing I learnt is that you can’t please everyone. I personally thought the clean interface was the best feature while others put it down as the worst feature claiming it to be boring. The usability of websites can be related to the usability of all general applications so I’m sure I’ll be able to use the knowledge gained from this tutorial in many other aspects of design.

At home I found two could websites outlining what doesn’t make a good website (1,2) and the disability guidelines for web designers to make their sites accessible for disabled people.

1. Top 10 mistakes in web design –

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9605.html

2. Web pages that suck –

http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/

3. Website disability guidelines –

http://www.nngroup.com/reports/accessibility/

4. Wikipedia article on multimedia –

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia