Final Exam part 3: Critiquing Interfaces

Current notes interfaces (at 12/11/97)


I will emphasize the structure of my critique presentation in such a way that it reflects the categories of usability principles.


Learnability

  • First, since this interface is a new kind of interface to access class notes, so I will not emphasis my critique on generalizability across a variety of applications.

  • This interface gives a quick idea to the user of how to access each note. Each slide can be scrolled up and down to see the written material on the slides. Students who participate in class can easily see which slide that they need to review. By just clicking at some part of the slide, the audio will start and corresponding to the time when that part of the slide is mentioned. User can quickly predict the way the note works with the audio.

  • Each class notes can be accessed in the same way. It's easy to understand how each slide works when users understand the relationship between a slide and the audio part.

  • Time line feature in the left side of the interface give some clues to users to be able to predict of how long each slide will last. Users can understand this feature easily be looking at the length of the time line of each slide.

  • This interface offers consistency across various platform since it is implemented and accessed via web browser. Users can access to the notes from any platform in these days as long as they have access to the network and any web browser.

  • One problem of the learnability principle of this interface is that it does not clearly make the users understand or form a model of the system's behaviour correctly. Audio part, which started synchronously with the slide clicked, does not have any indication of the correspondence after that at all. Users can lose track of where they are supposed to watch in the slide while they are listening to the audio at the same time. Therefore, when any operation changes some aspect of the internal state, it is important that the change should happen in the consistency way and users can be easily seen of such change.


    Flexibility

  • This system offers a multi-model outputs (visual and audio effects) to users. This increases the capability of the users to absorb richer information presented from the system in multiple channels. Information is presented in a clear media, i.e, the resolution of the notes is very good (compare to the resolution of the slides in the early stage of this interface). Sound quality is also good (of course, this depends heavily on the traffic on the network by the time this system is used).

  • This system is flexible enough that it lets users to access the notes in several ways. Users can choose the individual slide directly by clicking at the actual slide or by clicking at the time line feature.

  • The interface offers great adaptability since users can adjust the level of audio sound, listen to only the part that users want to hear within the same slide or any slide. However, it does not adapt itself based on user expertise or observed repetition of the system.


    Robustness

  • This system allow users to perform tasks in achieving some goals, i.e, reviewing their class material before midterm exam.

  • Clicking at the particular note can give users a quick access to the matching audio part. The response time is fast (of course, it depends on the traffic in the network at that moment)

  • Major task that users perform on the system is to select the needed slide and listen to the audio part. Once the slide is selected and users start moving the scroll bar of the slides up and down, they might lose track of the current slide that they have selected. There is no way to recover from this kind of error

  • Users can only know or observe the initial correspondence at the time they select a slide. After that it is very hard to observe the relationship between the current state of the audio feature and visual note.

  • The system does not have any way to search a particular content in the class notes. Content can be either words written on the slides or spoken words recorded during the class time. Since this system is intended to increase users' learnability, so this ability to search will increase the level of task conformance.


    Suggestions of improvement

  • Continuous update a mapping between visual and audio features.

  • Offer more adaptivity or automatic customization of the user interface by the system.

  • Provide search engine that can search contents in the slides and audio features.

  • Having highlights in a particular position on each current activated slide will increase the observability of the system.