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.