Interaction, Usability and User Experience Goals are some concepts in Human Computer Interaction that correlated with our everyday life. We interact with websites, our personal computers, the ticket-machines, TV remote controls and others.
You are required to write a two-page-essay to discuss about one device and website that changed the way you know does things. You need to explain about the interaction that is taking place between you and that device and website. Is the change brought by the interaction or intelligent components of the device and website?
The device that I would choose is calculator. Calculator is simple electrical device that mainly use for calculation. I am a student and I will often use calculator for do some calculation. Now I will explain the interaction that takes place between me and the calculator.
The calculator that I used is shown below:
Which the calculator provides many different functions of buttons so that to make me comfortable by doing different calculation. When I am calculating about percentage, such as what would be the price of RM30.00 after it had deduct a 50% discount. I will have to press the button "3" and button "0" which 30 will be shown in the screen of the calculator. Then I will have to press the button "X" button which means multiply. After I had press the multiply button, the screen will flash for a while, which it means I had press the multiply button. Then I had to press button "5" and button "0" which represent 50. Then I had to press the "%" button, but in this calculator does not provide a straight away button for "%" so I had to press the "shift" button and then press the "=" button to make it as the percent button. Then the screen will straight away produce the output which is "15". Then I had to do the calculation for the deduction. I will have to press button "3" and button "0" which represent 30. Then, I had to press the "-" button for minus. After that, I had to press "1" and "5" which is 15(the amount of discount). Then I had to press "=" to get the output and the answer will straight away appear on the screen which is "15". So, that is an example of how I interact with the calculator.
The website I would choose is W3School.com. The URL is as follows:
http://www.w3schools.com/
The objective of W3School.com is to teach some newbie programmer about how to create website. The main page contain many types of common interaction styles which is WIMP (windows, icon, menu and pointer), command line interface and menus. In addition, it has many different selections which allows user to choose about which chapter they would like to learn. For example, I would like to learn about how to create an HTML webpage, so I will have to click the words HTML, and it will go to the chapter that learn about how to use HTML. Then I will learn chapter by chapter. The website provides "try it yourself" which allow me to manipulate the coding so that I can learn by trying. Once I try the coding, the output will appear and so did I know which coding I had done wrong.
The usability can be divided into five which is effectiveness, efficiency, safety, utility, and memorability. In my own opinion, the effectiveness and efficiency of the calculator that I used is really high. It gives the accurate answer to me when I doing calculation. For safety, the calculator is safe to use. This is because it do no harm to human health. It is run by using battery, so the chance of human get electric shock from that calculator is 0%. The utility is in average. This is because some of the function does not being provided in this calculator. For example if I want to calculate the probability, I am not able to do the calculation by using this calculator due to it does not have this kind of function. However, the function of this calculator is easy to remember. For the user experience, the calculator is really smart and useful.
For the usability of the website, the website is good. For effectiveness, the website is easy to use. This is because it using simple English that can be understand by all of the human. I would like to learn about how to create a HTML page, so I will click the "html learning guide". Then the website will go to the HTML learning page. Other than that, it provides a search engine so that the user can search for what topic they would want to learn about. The efficiency of this website is good too. Once the user had click on what they would like to learn about, a window with coding will occur. User can manipulate the coding and test the output of the coding they had input. So, it will let the user to try hands on the coding. For the satisfaction of the design of the website, it is good. The website using simple color which is white and green to be the background color of the pages so that user may concentrate on the tutorial but not the attractive design of the page. For the user experience, the website is user-friendly and it is useful for programmer who wants to learn to create a website through Internet.
In my own words, the calculator that I am using now is better than the old calculator. This is because it has been implemented and the function has been improved according to the Paradigm. From a simple calculator that only have limited function until the calculator that we are using now, the improvement is really fast. This is due to achieve the goal of usability and user experience goal. So, the calculator nowadays has really changes to a device which contain more function such as some of the calculator nowadays can calculate the probability.
Question 2
Good Human Computer Interaction design relies on principles that come from traditional design principles. There are seven design principles of such design: contrast, balance, proportion, rhythm, harmony, movement, and unity.
Discuss whether the website that you have mentioned in the previous question complies with these seven design principles in Human Computer Interaction.
Every webpage need a good design to make a famous and user-friendly website. If the website had a bad design, the user may not visit that website often. However, what is mean by a good design webpage and bad design webpage? A good design webpage is a webpage that the design is favorable to human eyes and its information can be shown clearly. To make a good design, the traditional principle design which divided into seven: contrast, balance, proportion, harmony, movement, rhythm, and unity is needed.
The W3School.com which is choose as the website in the first question follows some of the traditional principle design that makes me like to visit the website for learning my programming. The principle that this website follows is contrast, proportion, unity and balance.
The traditional principle contrast is used when to make some of the words in a sentence which different from other words. Normally this kind of words has some special meaning or it is the important words of the whole sentences. In the website, in a sentence which is "HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language" the words "H" from hyper, "T" from text, "M" from Markup and "L" from language is bold so that the user know the meaning of HTML. Moreover, in the website, the sentence "HTML is not a programming language, it is a markup language" bold the markup language. This is because the webpage developer would like user to know the main important point that HTML is a markup language.
The principle proportion is used to make the important information be present more clearly and in the correct way to present. For example if the word "contact number" in a business card is too small, it would not be a good design. This is because the contact number is important in a business card so that customer can contact the company. In this website, the webpage developer use different size of font to present the webpage. The bigger font is use for the title or the subtitle so that user can see the different between the content and the subtitle.
In addition, the website has used the principle unity. The principle unity state that the typestyle of a webpage is limited at most two. This is because too many different kinds of typestyle will leads user to be dizzy and they will leave the website. The typestyle is important for the information successfully delivered to the user. In this website, the web developer uses a fix font so that the user can get their information appropriately.
The balance principle plays an important role in a website. It describe that the color of the background and the information must be balance so that the user can see the information clearly. For example, if a website background color is using yellow color, the font should use a color which is darker such as black, brown or purple. If the font with lighter color is used, the information will not be successfully delivered to the user. In the website W3School.com, the webpage developer using white color as the background color which is comfortable for human eyes. It uses green and black as the font color. Due to this website is a learning guide website, it is important for user to view each words in the webpage, so the webpage developer has using the principle balance to make the information clearly.
Conclusion
In the end of my assignment, I want to say thank you to Olympia College Johor Bahru by giving me the chance to do this research and make me more understand about the Human and Computer Interaction. Other than that, I want to thanks all lecturers in Olympia College. They are willing to help me and answer my question. Moreover, I want to thanks the provider of the website. They provide the information so I can search and learning on the Internet.
In this assignment, I found out that question two is harder than question one. This is because I do not know well about the seven traditional principle designs. To solve this question, I try to search it from internet about what is the seven traditional principle design. After I had known about understand it clearly, and then I started to do and finish the whole assignment. At last, once again, I finish the assignment on time, thanks to all the people that had helped me a lot in my assignment.
Referencing
Refsnes Data. (2011). W3School.com. Available: http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_intro.asp. Last accessed 6 Mar
SitePoint Pty. Ltd.. (2011). Human-Computer Interaction and Your Site. Available: http://articles.sitepoint.com/article/computer-interaction-site. Last accessed 6 Mar 2011.
Troy Holmes. (2011). What is Human-Computer Interaction . Available: http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-human-computer-interaction.htm. Last accessed 6 Mar 2011.
