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.