Benyon, Benyon and Turner Designing Interactive Systems (Course text) 56 - 75)

The following shows that I have have completed a reading exercise. By reading through Designing Interactive System by Benyon and Turner, which was pages from 56 to 75.
I have made bullet points on main points when I was speed reading through. I was mainly focusting on desging principles and synthesis, which these invovled describing how two of the design principles relate to the usability heuristics.


Broad Reading
I have speed read the material in about 55 minutes, which I did not spend longer on it in order to get more practice and feel on the speed reading exercise.

The following are the main 6 bullets points that I came up with:

• Design principle and websites, in terms of Navigation around a website enable people to discover the structure and content of a specific site and how to find their way to a particular part of the site is a key issue.
• Interactive system design is different in different contexts and on different technological platforms.
• Achieving a balance of usability between four principle factors of human-centred interactive system design, PACT- people, activities, context and technologies.
• The 12 main design principles which are visibility, consistency, familiarity, navigation, affordance, control, feedback, recovery, constraints, flexibility, style and conviviality.
• Key features of acceptability are political, convenience, cultural and social habits, usefulness and economic.
• The 12 design principles allow designers to evaluate design ideas. Therefore design principles 1-4 are concerned with access and learnability, principles 5-7 concerned with ease of use, principles 8-9 concerned with safety, principles 10-12 accommodating differences between people.

Main points of Broad reading

• Designing for windows are the usability techniques windows used so that there product covered all users.
• Pact analysis which helps in usability design. The designer can concentrate on the main points of the pact analysis which are people, context, activities and technologies so that they cover all aspect of designing for usability so there product or software is a success because it covered all the main points.
• The 12 main design principles which are visibility, consistency, familiarity, navigation, affordance, control, feedback, recovery, constraints, flexibility, style and conviviality.

Focussed reading

The following shows that I have found the Design Principles section. Identified the design principles and defined each in my own words.

1.) Visibility: Meaning the key common and key features are visible to the user. For example all the righ buttons and links on site are on the right place for the user, avoiding the activity of looking around for them.

2.) Consistency: Meaning that every page has the same style layout. For example a website not having the home page blue with different buttons and the next yellow with different buttons. To let the user to be not confused.

3.) Familiarity: Using common and known symbols including languge. This will allow the user to recornise the symbol or sign and know what it means straight away. Eg: On a webpage, an icon showing a picture of a house to illutrate that it goes to homw.

4.) Affordance: Meaning that the design has to be designed clearely for the purpose of whats its outcome should be.

5.) Navigation: Meaning that support is provided to the user, in terms of enabling them to go through the website in and out without having any problems. This also means enabling users to go forward and backwards to any specific page that they want.

6.) Control: Specifying and making it clear that who is in control and what is in control. Therefore allowing the user to take control, mostly the navigation.

7.) Feedback: Meaning that in case of an error message, there systems needs to have an alternative or how this can be resolved. Therefore allowing the user to fix any mistakes that has be done.

8.) Recovery: This also relates to the feedback, which means that if there is an error or mistake there should be recovery action that will put back the settings to what it was previousely.

9.) Contraints: Meaning that a prevention is made by including a contraint in the system. This will restrict users to not do things that they are not supposed to do, therefore protecting the users.

10.) Flexibility: Meaning the systems or navigation allowing the user to have different options in doing a task (Alot of choices).

11.) Style: Meaning that the design should gain the users interests, in terms of be attractive and having interesting features.

12.) Conviviality: Meaning that the interactive systems should have a jovial nature. In other words easy going and friendly.

Synthesis:

The following shows that I have described 2 design principles ,which relate to any of the usability Heuristics I have studied in Block 3, lectures 2.

Two design Heuristic chosen:
1. Error prevention - comparing with consistency and feedback
2. Visibility - comparing with consistency and feedback

Error prevention
In terms of error prevention and consistency of a website. A user can know and have a feel that they are on the same website by having the consistency in different pages of the website (Eg: Colours, buttons, navigation menu etc). Error prevention will also provide an effort in allowing the users to avoid an hugh mistakes being done.

Visibility
Visibility is one of the important Heuristic in designing, which provides the user with information on what is taking place through appropriate feedback. Therefore allowing the user to get relevant feedback when something is not done right. This heuristic evaluation goes with the design principle feedback because they both allows users to correct their mistakes therefore it wont leave users confused.