Week 6

Last weeks lecture i found very boring, i found myself easily loosing concerntration during the lecture. i found that using the OHP to explain usuability was not very useful. when we had geene stubbs i found she was able to hold everyones conerntration alot more due to the use of the internet as also good examples of graphics etc... overall though i did get the idea of usuablility but i find that if the lecturer was to use the the use of computers i would hold my concerntration alot better.

During the tutorial this week we had to consider ways in which we couldn include user tasks into usability evaluation. First we had to think of a typical user of the University of Glamorgan Website, once we had done that we had to think of a task which they would typically perform. Once we did this we had to imagine we were the user and evaluate how easy the task was to perform, and write down any problems using the website, which may need to be altered in order for the user to have the easiest and most efficent use of the website. Once we had noticed these we then had to give the task to another student to perform to analyse how they perfomed the task and note down any problems that i didnt notice but they did.
Two external links this week was hard. So therefore i have chosen the website which we did our task on and also the Nielsen's Ten Usabiltiy Heuristics

http://www.glam.ac.uk/
www.useit.com/papers/heuristic/heuristic_list.htm

Week 5

During the lecture we talked about design a practicality and usability. During the tutorial we thought about an old design such as the old televisions, which only had buttons which allows only have buttons which allows 4 channels, we looked at the future as it is now, and come to the decision that this was not practical as we have hundreds of channels available now. So the old television cannot be used. I learned that you always have to look to the future when designing, because if things can progress they probably will. When you are making your design you have to think of the long term usability and how the user will be affected with any changes that could have been made.

During this weeks tutorial we had to look at a website which had the recommendations for building a homepage. We had to look through chapter 5 and comment on the recommendations published on the website. We also had to consider different scenarios; such as would these recommendations apply to gambling websites, or children’s websites. With the recommendations in mind we then had to search the Glamorgan website and comment on whether the website used any of the recommendations published and if so how.

I really enjoyed this week’s lecture because the lecturer used real life examples in order to portray the lecture. This helped me understand the subject much better. I did not enjoy the tutorial as much as I found it tedious. I learn a lot from lectures but I find that the tutorials are not that helpful and this week did not relate to the lecture, or if it did I could not see the relationship between the two.

The Website links i am going to leave today are to show how television technology has moved on from where it used to be 4 buttons to the amount of channels we have now.

http://images.google.co.uk/images?hl=en&q=old%20televisions&oe=UTF-8&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wi
http://images.google.co.uk/images?svnum=10&um=1&hl=en&q=new+televisions&btnG=Search+Images

Week 4

This weeks lecture was based around the subject matter of Multimedia. Multimedia is a broad topic consisting of many off branches. For example, Multimedia consists of Text, SOunds, Graphics and Animation. Todays Internet is crowded with multimedia all over it and websites are today being built with more graphics and animations whan ever before. The growth of Multimedia on the web is evident as websites like YouTube are now worth billions of US Dollars. YouTube also link there multimedia to other websites using HTML. The fundimental components in multimedia, i.e, Grpahics, Animation etc all have specific file extentions that are supported within the web. Some examples of these are, .JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) and .GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) which are graphical file extentions. To round of this lecture we were shown some examples of multimedia within the Interenet. We were shown a two clips from YouTube, the Cadburys gorila advert and a videoa of Geogrge Bush and Tony Blair singing to eachother, this video had been digitaly composed.

The tutorial this week consisted of a task where i had to search the glamorgan website for certain aspects which are involved in making a good website. i had the checklist and had to search for it on the glamorgan website and then tick it off and answer questions if i found it. Some of these tasks involved looking for internal links, external links and use of text, animation and also video if applicable. The tutorial i found was very helpful as it made me actually think of what multimedia makes up the internet and websites, i didnt realise how much of the internet was multimedia based.

2 external links which are useful examples of multimedia are:
www.youtube.com - this is a link to a video website which is an example of multimedia
http://www.willamette.edu/wits/idc/mmcamp/Links_handout.htm - this is a link to many different examples of multimedia such as animation and videos.

Week 3

This weeks lecture was on HCI, HCI i didnt know anything about before i went to the lecture which meant i learned alot about the topic from the lecture. We looked at different interfaces and different websites and how they used different interfaces and the advantages and disadvantages of this. HCI stands for Human- Computer Interaction. I found it is all about how the computer and the user interacts using periferals such as the monitor and keybaord etc... so the use of a certain type of interface on a website such as flash on the sterophonics website can be good but only if your users have flash on their computer.
The tutorial this week i really enjoyed we did shape tweening which was where i made the shape number one into shape number two which was animated this tutorial allowed me to see a different part of flash which i have not experienced before. i found the worksheet to help us was very helpful and i had a lot of fun playing with flash, since knowing how to use the shape tweening part of flash. im enjoying these flash classes because i am learning more and more about flash which i never really looked at before. There is so much on the internet which is all flash i never realised how much of it was flash. And these flash tutorials are interesting aswell as useful.
Most games on the internet these days are using flash, below there a link to a website of games which are made in flash.
http://www.flash-game.net/
There is also another web site which people from around the world post their flash movies they have made to, the link is shown below
http://www.bestflashanimationsite.com/archive/video/

Week 2

I really enjoyed this weeks lecture, i learned alot, in the lecture we got taught flash, how to use the time gaps and also we got shown a flash movie where the movie allowed the user to move a mouse over a frog and you an disect the frog, it was very graphic and very impressive. It obviously toke alot of time in order to do it and i never thought that a flash presentation could be so grapic. The lecture in general was very enjoyable and was not boring by any means. the lecturer was able to keep everyones attention by the impressiveness of the flash movie examples she was showing us. In the tutorial got to play with flash, this was enjoyable because i have used flash before but only brefily, so being able to use it more in the tutorial was good because it allowed me to use parts of flash which i havent experienced. I was a bit put off by making a blog, but i am adjusting to the idea and am having fun writing these blogs. I have found 2 links to useful flash websites which i have posted with this blog.
http://www.w3schools.com/flash/default.asp
http://www.echoecho.com/flash.htm

Week1

This week i found very tasking as i had to adjust to university life, this was very tasking as i had to get use to the way the lectures teach and also how to take notes efficently and also in a way i could understand. I found enrolment very tasking though, the queues were very long and could take up to an hour in order to get to the registration part and also to get our enrolment cards. i am feeling that i am going to enjoy university life, and also enjoying making new friends and settling into university life.