Accessibility

Lecture

This weeks lecture was taken by Geenen Stubbs. We started the lecture by covering problems that were encountered in the previous weeks tutorial, where people were using actionscript 3.0 instead of 2.0 and therefore the instructions that were given on blackboard wouldn't work. We then went on to the main topic of the lecture which was accessibility, we looked at slides showing us all different types of accessibility, which covered such things as blindness, difficulty hearing and colour blindness just to cover a few. This was then followed by a video showing us how people with certain special needs use computers. One example of accessibility tool is voice recognition software for people who have difficulty using a keyboard and mouse, another example was a screen reader for blind people. The lecture finished with 2 more videos, one was a video advertising some voice recognition software and showing us how it worked, the other was a flash animation. The flash animation was the sequel to the animator vs animation of which i hosted on my blog a few weeks ago.

External Reading
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_recognition

Tutorial
This weeks tutorial was another flash lesson, we were set the task of creating a tween inside a tween. To do this we had to follow the steps of making a tween, which are draw or write some text and convert it into a symbol, then insert keyframes and design the motion of the animation. To create the tween inside the tween we had to create a new symbol then select both of the symbols and create a symbol out of that selection, we could then create the tween for the individual symbol and the grouped symbol. To end this we inserted a button by following the previous weeks tutorials instructions.

Reflection
This weeks lecture was interesting and really informative. The lecture really made me realise that you have to consider so much more when designing a website, when you are designing a website you usually just think well i can read it and navigate the site so its usable, but you have to consider so much more. I was really impressed with some of the software designed to help people, such as the speech recognition software. This weeks tutorial was good fun but really easy and I'm looking forward to doing some more difficult flash work, i like experimenting with flash and trying to make flash bases for websites to i am looking forward to progressing with the flash work.

Evaluation

Lecture

This was the last lesson this term that Daniel Cunliffe would be taking us for, we started by discussing technical systems and how certain new technology has made other technology almost obsolete, for example mobile phones reducing the number of people who wear wrist watches. Then following this there were examples such as shoe laces that will always be around. This discussion lead on to the topic of evaluation which is concerned with the gathering of data about the usability of a design. After an introduction we started to discuss why people evaluate, such reasons as to check that is conforms to a standard. We then discussed the "Real World", this is what the user wants from the product. Near the end of the lecture we discussed formative and summative evaluation which are evaluation types which are applied at different times during the implementation. The lecture ended with the topic of qualitative and qualitive evaluation.

External Reading
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evaluation
http://www.socialresearchmethods.net/kb/intreval.php

Tutorial
This weeks tutorial we were back to playing around with flash (Yay). We were set the task of creating a simple 3 page slide that was controlled by buttons. Each page was labled with some simple text and had a next or a previous buttons or both. The buttons the first keyframe required that we used a stop action so that the animation wouldn't play and would wait for the release of the button to advance. The buttons were set actions using an on command and a gotostop command. After completing the set work for the tutorial i carried on playing around with different buttons. The class seemed to have problems getting the buttons to work because of using Actionscript 3.0 files.

Reflection
This weeks lecture was really interesting and informative, i found the topic we were doing easy to understand. The beginning of the lecture was quite funny, Daniel was annoyed about someone not returning the baton to allow the class to register, we were then talking about technology making older things obsolete such as a mobile phone with a clock replacing the wristwatch. We also got to look at Daniel's shoe and this emphasized a type of technology that hasn't been replaced, shoe laces. This weeks tutorial was great, i had tried to experiment with getting buttons to work before in previous flash lessons but was unsuccessful so it was interesting to finally find out how to do them.

More Usability

Lecture

The lecture this week was taken by Daniel Cunliffe again and we continued to look at usability. We started this by talking about the key points, such as the design must be people facing and that we must understand usability, designing and testing to be able to create a usable system. Following this we discussed what makes things usable, or not, this was answered with a usability triangle. The triangle covered 3 parts of the usability, effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction. The effectiveness is used to assess that the user achieves desired goals, efficiency is how accurately and how complete their goals are and finally satisfaction is the comfort and the acceptability of the system. We were then shown a diagram of "System Acceptability" which was designed by Nielsen. After this we left the usability of the system and started talking about the experience of the user as a factor. There are 3 groups of experience level, theses are novice, intermediate and expert. These groups all require different types of system such as a novice user would require tutorials where as an expert user wouldn't and a novice user would have a limited number of commands and an expert user would have lots of powerful commands.

External Reading
http://www.euser-eu.org/Document.asp?MenuID=168
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usability_testing

Tutorial

This weeks tutorial was similar to last weeks it was yet another sheet based on usability. This time it was given to us to asses the design of the universities website. This week we were more focused on how useable the site is using such ideas as the usability triangle mentioned above. This meant we had to apply the 3 parts effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction to the university website, these parts were applied by asking ourselves questions about the website. We had to do this in steps, the first step was to set an example of a simple task to carry out on the website and see how easy it was to carry out. The 2nd step was to apply the guidelines we used last week and finally we swaped our information with a partner to act as a test subjects.

Reflection

This weeks lecture was interesting covering the different levels of user ability and describing what they require, i thought this was helpful because when you make something you seem to assume that they will be able to use things like you do and having these points opens your eyes to how much you need to consider for novice users. The system acceptability diagram by Nielsen was good too it simplified the needs to design anything to make sure its usable. I like the way that Daniel Cunliffe teaches the tutorials but the topic usability is pretty boring. I didn't find the tutorial very helpful at all i just thought it was boring - I much preferred the flash tutorials!

Usability

Lecture

This weeks lecture was totaly different in a few ways. The reason for these differences were because of a change in lecturer, this was our first lecture with Daniel Cunliffe. The lecture started with a disscusion about technology, such as the baton we use to sign into lectures and how it could be improved. We then went on to disscuss other types of technology such as the computer systems in cars and the front desk of the lecture theatre. The lectures main topic was usability, "Usability is a term used to denote the ease with which people can employ a particular tool or other human-made object in order to achieve a particular goal." (Wikipedia, 2007). We started covering this topic by being shown an old pannel of a television, the pannel had 4 buttons to change channels labled BBC1, BBC2, ITA1 and ITA2 it also had 4 control knobs 1 to turn on the TV and control volume, 1 for contrast, 1 for brightness and 1 for colour. We went on to talk about the design of multimedia and what has to be considered when designing it, such factors that we discussed were if its a single user, the level of user skill and what the environment of use would be like. To sum up this process we were shown a diagram which is known as CUTS.

External Reading

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

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

Tutorial

This weeks tutorial we were analyzing two guidelines for the creation of a usable website. The guidelines are by Koyanl, Balley and Nall, the other is produced by Nielsen, links are bellow. To do this we were split into groups and given a list of questions we should ask ourselves about the guidelines. Examples of the questions are:

- Are the guidelines presented in a usable way ?

- Do the guidelines seem sensible ?

There were about 10 more questions applying to this topic. At the end of the tutorial we discussed the answered in the class and most people seemed to be in agreement in opinions.

Guideline Links

http://usability.gov/pdfs/guidelines.html
http://www.useit.com/papers/heuristic/heuristic_list.html

Reflection

I thought this weeks lecture was really good, the change of teaching style to accompany the change in lecturer. The way we talked about the way we design technology for the different types of users was interesting, an example of a design was that the tape deck at the front of the lecture hall had labels on each side saying "Use this side" on one side and "Use other side" on the other, which i found funny, but this helped me realise that some users aren't used to using the system. I'm not quite old enough but I've still seen TV's with controls such as the panel we were shown and its hard to realise how much technology had changed, and how we adapt new technology to allow for expansion in the field of technology, such as extra RAM slots on motherboards.