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.