Exercise The Student example essay topic

Introduction: This essay will go through each of the five exercises that were completed and explain how they could be improved and what were the good points about them and how this would benefit the student. It will also have a conclusion that will go through alternative exercises and how the exercises have run over the course of the module. CMT Exercises: As part of the CMT 2200 module five exercises had to be completed in order to complete the coursework. Theses exercises were to design an on-line diary system. The first exercise that had to be completed was for the student to be able to show an understanding of the Heuristic evaluation. By completing this task the student is required to thoroughly read through each heuristic and understand them.

This may only be a part of the task but this gives the student a good run through them as the student will probably have to read them more than once to be able to explain them in their own words. The student is also benefited by the fact that they will have to evaluate a web page giving good and bad points. This is a helpful technique to get the student to think about how the heuristic works and refines the meaning into the student's head. As helpful as this exercise maybe perhaps if the students were able to choose their own web page to evaluate this might give them more motivation to read further into the subject.

Furthermore this will give the student something to look forward to as they get to evaluate something that they enjoy. As the student moves on to the second exercise of the coursework they are going into the early stages of designing the on-line diary. What this exercise brings to the students is the ability to understand hierarchical task analysis. By using the diary, which is a very common product that is used worldwide then they have the ability to construct a healthy hierarchical task analysis (HTA).

This is a good base point for students as they can easily assemble the HTA which helps them understand how to build another one for a different purpose and give them a fair idea why it is a important in the design stage. The student will now move on to the plan of the HTA, which gives them further benefits. The benefits being that once they number the stages of the diary this helps the student to see in deeper detail how the HTA works and helps in design the on-line diary. It also helps the student to see the sub task of the task that the diary will be capable off.

The final task of exercise two gives the students a good idea why it is important that the on-line version of a diary has to be a able to perform the main functions of a manual diary. This hopefully lets the student understand that it is not all about adding very flashy features. In addition it links well to the HTA showing why it is important to keep the simple features of a manual diary in the on-line version. One way of improving exercise two for the students could be done by allowing the students to add more features that they thought were not already in a manual diary. This could make the student think in the frame of mind that will allow the user a feature that is new and helpful in their daily lives.

By doing this the student can apply it to their HTA and plan which gives them a bigger interest in the work. One thought that could be processed is that the second exercise does not relate a lot the first exercise and this could slip the mind of the student, as the heuristics is a very important part of the design. Perhaps a small discussion about which heuristic would be applied the most in each of the different stages of the HTA will help stimulate their mind in remembering the heuristics. As the modules progresses the student moves on to exercise three. This exercise concentrates on the requirements that will have to be meet for the on-line system.

By completing this exercise the student can understand what is needed to create a well-designed diary. The student describes the functional requirements and provides a justification for the requirement as well as usability requirement. As the student is doing this they will start to realise how this will affect the designing process of the diary in the next exercise. And by justifying why they need the requirement they are relating it to the heuristics. As the student is relating the justification to Nielsen's Heuristics they are even bettering themselves to the understanding of it, which will eventually help them further their understanding of it and know doubt be helpful in the exam. A cleaver feature of this exercise is that it relates to the past two exercises to it.

The student will need to look at exercise two for the HTA and add the requirements and also look at exercise one for the heuristics. This is a good combination of both pervious exercises, which helps the student improve their understanding of HCI. Although this exercise hits all the marks for the student to think about the requirements an extra feature that could be added to it would be that the student would have to produce a functional requirement for each part of their HTA. This way they only think about the requirements of their own HTA and not something irrelevant that would not go into the diary.

Furthermore the student could produce a usability requirement that would justify each of the heuristic. This may sound like a lot of work but the end result would show in the next exercise, as they will be able to design the system quicker and become in the right frame of mind for designing the diary. The next exercise (four) moves on to the actual design of the diary system. This exercise should be done by using the format of storyboards to allow the student to design the diary. It is closely linked to exercise three, as the students will have to design with the functional requirements in mind as well as the usability requirements. By producing the storyboard the student is able to see how the requirements becomes a very important part of the designing process.

The students start to understand that the requirements show what the diary has to have in order to be a successful system. It helps brings them a step closer to how the user would want to be able to use the system. When the student is designing the system by using storyboards this helps them look at what the user will see. This will give the students a better viewpoint in what the users may see in order use the diary and thus helping the student get grips to how important the requirements become. Creating a storyboard is an good method of designing the diary but this process can take a while to do and many attempts would have to be made in order to make sure that the requirements have been fulfilled. Therefore an alternative to creating the storyboard on paper a storyboard can be produced in paint as a rough guide and also the student starts to get the feel of how the system will look like.

And by producing on the computer it provides the student with a good template for the next exercise. Furthermore a questionnaire could be produced for this exercise. Once the student has created a rough draft of the storyboard he / she can hand it to a member of the public who is unfamiliar with the course and ask them to fill out the questionnaire. The questionnaire could quiz them about the design of the web page and what they thought was good and bad and to list any improvements that could help improve it. This will surely help improve the quality of the diary design. When the student finally moves on to the last exercise they will have to implement the storyboard that they have created onto computer so that some users will be able to use it.

This exercise is an extension to the last exercise (four) and provides the students with a goal that must be meet. By doing his exercise the students can see how the planning of the HTA and heuristics has finally paid off. As the user is able to use any software of their choice to produce the web page then it gives them the opportunity to allow users to use it and try the different functions that they have set out as well as testing the requirements. This then gives the students the ability to be able to produce a web page and they are able to have a better understanding about HCI. A suggestive point towards this exercise would be that the students should be marked for the actual design of the web page. Either by using word, FrontPage or dream weaver this will allow them to demonstrate their abilities to design a good diary.

Instead of being marked for the user testing the student will be marked on the design. Although the student will need feedback from other people, this would have already been done by doing the questionnaire in exercise four (as was mentioned earlier). By doing this the student can concentrate more on the design and from what other users have thought of it try to create it and then finally it will be assessed by the tutor as they try some tasks on it. However, another way in which the exercise could be improved for the student is by making the student have the web page analysed by more than three people. An alternative number could be 6 or 7 this way the results can be more accurate and conclusions can be more clear and reliable.

This will give the students a much clearer feedback to what went wrong with the design or what could be improved. Another suggestion that could help improve exercise five is that instead of producing a transcript the students will only need to record important things like the good and bad points that were said. And a little record of body language and how they interacted with the web page. For example whether they became frustrated or if they were calm during the tasks they completed. Conclusion: The general layout of the exercises is good for the students to follow.

By using this layout they are able to complete the necessary tasks and cover the main topics involved in HCI. Although these exercises are not perfect and can be improved like making the students produce the final web page on Microsoft Word it stills help them have an excellent understanding of the final project. If the module were to be changed then one alternative to the exercise would be that the first exercise should be erased. By doing this the students will have more time to concentrate on the other exercises which are more important in the development of the on-line diary system. Furthermore the students will be covering Nielsen's heuristics in the other exercises and the prior learning of the heuristics can be made in the own time of the students and lectures.

An important factor in the module is exercise five. This task will be quite a significant part of the design so a method that could be taken is that all students should produce the web page on word and save it as a HTML file. Using FrontPage is more of a lengthy process and it is known to have a lot of problems with it especially if the student is a beginner with the program. So the exercise should make all the students do their web pages on Microsoft Word, as it will be faster and easier. It can also perform nearly all the functions as FrontPage.

As while when the five exercises are completed the student should be left feeling that they fully understand Nielsen's heuristics and the reasons why they are so important. They should also be able to see that after the exercises they are able to understand how each exercise is linked to each other and how from that they are able to produce a good design of an on-line diary and eventually producing a web page that is what they designed and fully complies with the heuristics.