Final Exam: Part 3

Task: You are to provide a critique of the current notes interface. You should consider the effectiveness of the interface given the typical user population and user tasks associated with the notes. You should end your critique with a set of suggestions for further improvement of the interface and reasons why you think those improvements are needed.

I decided to perform a heuristic evaluation on the notes interface. The page that was used is: http://c2000.gatech.edu/zenpad/classes/cs6751_97_Fall/Nov.20.1997.1/html/

A dual-Pentium computer running Windows NT was used for this evaluation. The Audio player on the system is RealPlayer 5.0 and the computer is equipped with large external speakers.

Out of the 10 heuristics that Jacob Nielson suggests I chose the following 6:

• Visibility of system status
• Match between system and the real world
• User control and freedom
• Flexibility and efficiency of use
• Aesthetic and minimalist design
• Help and documentation

This kind of exercise is not well suited for a single evaluator but rather for a small group of evaluators. However, this will be the easiest and probably the most useful exercise to perform in this case.

1) Opening a web page from the notes interface brings up a new browser and makes it the current window. If you try to click on another link in the notes, however, the new page is loaded in the same browser as the previous but the browser is no longer made the active window. If you are running the notes browser in a maximized window you may not realize that the page that you requested in being downloaded in the background. I kept clicking on a link 5 times till I realized that.

2) By just looking at the interface one cannot tell that some kind of audio stream is available.

1) Clicking on a stroke in a slide that contains a whole sentence of hand-written text should start the audio from the beginning of that sentence. Now the audio starts from the very time the stroke/letter was written and usually there is a significant pause during that time (the instructor is writing the sentence on the liveboard). See slide 7 for example.

2) Slides with graphics are also confusing (slide 3 and slide 5). Usually one is not interested in what was said in class when a line, which was part of a table, was drawn.

3) Slides that were not covered in class (were not loaded or annotated) still appear in the slides section of the page but do not appear in the control section (left). There should be something saying that these were not covered. (Slides 20 and 21).

1) Users cannot control the real player from the navigation bar (left). One has to switch to Real Player and then do the action. It might be useful to have an audio control box in on the top of the navigation section (left). This might be useful for things like fast-forwarding or rewinding a sentence.

2) No next/previous slide button. If you want to get to slide number 20 you still have to scroll down.

1) Not possible to rewind the audio stream from Real Player. If you click on a stroke and find out that it was made after the audio relevant for it you cannot go back easily. You have to click on a different section of the screen and hope that you have guessed right this time.

2) Hard to go to previous/next lecture from the current one.

3) The link on the top of the navigation bar saying CS6751 does not point to the syllabus.

4) Clicking the back button does not have the desired effect. One has to click it many times and fast enough in order to get through the auto-forwarding feature of the previous page.

1) It takes a while for the page to load. I tried scrolling down while the page was not fully loaded and the page looked quite ugly. The audio navigation bar appeared broken.

1) No on-line help on how to use the system/interface is available.

Make the link on top of the navigation bar that says CS6751 point to the place in the syllabus where the link for the current lecture notes appear. Now this link goes to the beginning of the class page. This should be very easy to implement.

When clicking on slides with graphics make the audio stream start from the time when the instructor started to draw the graphic and not from the time when an individual line was drawn. Then if necessary the audio can be fast-forwarded.

Provide a help page and make it accessible if not from every lecture then at least from the main page for the class. The instructor can also explain how to use the interface in the beginning of the class but since the interface is changing throughout the quarter this might not be enough. Also since the interface is used for other classes the other instructors may not even be aware that there have been some changes.

Add next/previous button.

Overall the interface is quite learnable given the user population (computer science majors). It might be worth studying, however, how a non-CS people will use it and what kind of problems they would experience. After all sooner or later this kind of interface will be used by other students and teachers on and off campus.

In general this class completely destroyed my note taking abilities. In a class like this where a lot of theoretical material is covered I usually take notes. I tried to do the same in this class up to the midterm then I just stopped. I found out that my notes contained only the outlines of the lectures. I have been copying to my notebook the same stuff that was on the whiteboard and later available On-line. I don't usually do that in other classes. I usually write a lot more that the outline- facts that I find interesting or things that I did not know. The outline is not that useful if you don't know the material.

Sometimes I found myself unable to write anything down simply because the instructor will change to a new slide very quickly. The technology used in this class allowed for very fast pace during the lecture. The outline will appear almost automatically on the screen and the instructor will start talking about something completely different from what he was talking about in the previous slide.

When I was studying for the midterm I still had some notes and I used my notebook and textbook to review the material. I used the notes interface half an hour before the exam for quick review. I found that the online notes are especially useful for this purpose. In half an hour I was able to cover half a quarter worth of material. Of course I did not have time to use the audio and I don't think that it can be very useful for review. It is probably more useful in case you missed a lecture and want to catch up with the material being covered. Since I was present at all class meetings I did not need to do that.

Since the final was take home and was relatively unconnected to the material covered during the second part of the quarter I did not use the online notes except to find out what was said during class about Norman's Philosophy ( the topic of my final paper). Thus, as a student taking this class I did not find a great need to use the slides. This is not to say that they are not useful but I simply did not need them.