Critiquing Interfaces

Interface 1: class web page

Good:

  • simple interface. The class information is also clearly separated by lines. There is no need to have a very fancy graphical interface for class page since it should be plain and simple for any students to go look for the information about their homework or papers. This simple class page is also fast to load.

  • using tables for class schedule, exam period, and text information is easy for visualization.

  • pointer for class newsgroup is very useful, since any information relevant to the class, user should be able to reach from the class page.


    Bad:

  • some information may be useful only in the first week of the class, such as textbooks information or general information. Those kinds of information should be kept in other pages. Or another world, there should be like "main menu" so that some less important information will not be seen every time we visit this page. And it will be easy to add other new information to the page.

  • since there are mainly people from CoC and Psychology taking this class, there should be at least the links to these main departments, so that students may use them later on if they want to find other information about the departments.

  • from my experience for using WWW to get information about my classes, I found it useful to have some links to point to other additional information or interesting sites. Those links can be new papers in that field, major conferences for those fields, or fun stuff that instructor might think it is worth for student to discover new fun thing.


    Interface 2: Audio-enhanced class notes

    Good:

  • audio is another great way to have access to richer contents. Combining with class notes (with real hand-writing) I feel there are some interaction going on when I listen to audio and look at class notes. The quality of the sound, though it is perfect, but it is in some range that I can spend time listen to it.

  • the class notes are very flexible since professors can express or teach in their styles. They can write or draw or underline in many ways and the notes look pretty much like someone just copy the white board into computer.

  • for the audio part, it is nice to have time stamps, so students can know the progress of the class activity.


    Bad:

  • I understand that at that time for CS6751 Fall 1996, the timestamp for audio part did not work as good as nowadays. We can not go to the portion of the lecture as easy as these days. By having the mechanism to match part of audio to the lecture notes, it increases the interaction between users and class materials.

  • The way to select the class notes is inconvenient. I tried to select the later part of lecture notes. First, I needed to move the scroll bar to the slide that I wanted, then I selected it. I discovered that my scroll bar went back to the very first slide, so when I wanted to go to next slide, I need to scroll all the way to the slide that I wanted to see again. It's such a pain. So there should be an easier way to move to next slide.

  • one difficult thing that I found was that I couldn't identify the correspondence between the audio I was listening and the notes that I was looking at. There should be a way to synchronize among these two materials.


    Interface 3: More audio-enhanced class notes

    Good:

  • the details, I mean the resolution of the lecture notes is much better than the previous class page. I think this improves the readability of the notes a lot.

  • I like the interface for the notes more than the previous class page. The little graph above of each slide allows me quickly to go to the note that I want to view. The time stamp is also give me the useful information about the duration of each slide and I can access the audio that match with some portion of the notes.


    Bad:

  • even though the little graph above each slide gives me the flexibility to go back and forth or jump to the slide that I want quickly, by that application of the graph itself, it should not appear above of every slides. We can put the graph in separate frame so we don't need to have the graphs for each slide.

  • again, if I want to listen to the whole lecture, I should have a clue where to look at the notes while I am listening to the audio part. There should be an indication to match these two material together nicely.