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!