WEEK 5 & 6: COLORS, HUMAN ABILITIES AND DESIGN HEURISTICS

 WEEK 5

  Our professor gave us the a light activity which emphasizes the use of color in designing user interfaces before our fifth meeting. He said that we should familiarize ourselves with the importance of colors in UI. He also gave us an article to read for reference. By reading the article, I gently understand how truly important color is in designing user interfaces. In that activity, I learned that color played an important part in designing user interfaces. Color creates ideas, expresses messages, spark interest and generate certain emotions and some colors hold a universal significance. Like in every country, each color has different meanings.

    The topics that are discussed in our fifth meeting are human abilities, task analysis, user analysis and design heuristics. Human abilities has 3 agendas: first is the human information processing, next agenda is the cognitive processes and lastly is the emotion.

    The next topic discussed is the Task and User Analysis. Task analysis in human computer interaction is the recording of physical and perceptual actions of the user whilst executing the task while User analysis is a crucial aspect of user-centered systems design. And the last topic is about the Design Heuristics which help to identify usability problems in the user interface. Heuristic is a simple principle or rule of thumb. The Jakob Nielsen's 10 usability heuristics for user interface design was also tackled by our professor. 

WEEK 6

    On our 6th meeting, our professor continued the discussion about the usability heuristics. Help and Documentation is the tenth guideline of Nielsen's Heuristics that focuses on the users that need documentations and supports to resolve problems. I learned from Nielsen that even though a system can be used without documentation, it may be necessary to provide help and documentation to the users.

   

    Under the topic Help and Documentation, we discussed about the customer support, user support requirements. The 6 requirements in user support are availability, accuracy & completeness, consistency, robustness, flexibility, and unobtrusiveness. The types of documentation and help are also tackled by our professor: tutorial, quick reference, reference manual, searchable, and context-sensitive help.