Research paper: design and usability

Section 1: Week 2 PACT analysis This section of my portfolio will deal with a bus stop in Universitas Indonesia, Depok, Indonesia. I will use PACT (Week 2 Design and usability lecture, Huma Shaa: 2018).analysis in order evaluate the usability of this bus stop. A PACT analysis deals with (P) people, (A)activities, (C)context and (T) technology; this framework is used as a basis for making a product that has a user centred approach.

The people that will be using the buses and the board for the timing will be mostly students and people from the working population who will use it at a minimum of 2 times a day to go to work/school and then to go back The characteristics of these people are that they most likely don't have a car. Like most commuters they they probably do not like waiting a long time for their transport and most likely live a busy life. Some other people who are involved in this process are the driver who will be driving the bus of the commuter, this driver will have contact with other bus drivers through the radio and will know how far behind the next bus is. The organisation the runs the bus is also indirectly involved in the situation of the commuter as they will be able to provide the technology in order to alert the commuter as to where the bus is, without the company installing this the process wouldn’t work. Currently the commuter goes to the bus stop, sits down and waits for the bus to come . The way this could be improved is by have the commuter be aware of when the busses are coming so that they won’t have the leave their house earlier than necessary in order to get the bus which will save them time.The environment of the area changed depending upon where we are in the world, if we are waiting for a bus in indonesia in the summer then it is most likely to be extremely hot and this would be applicable. This could affect the technology as it could overheat and shut down. The same would go with the opposite weather when it is raining or cold as the rain could seep in to the technology and cause the circuit board to malfunction or the cold weather could cause the technology to freeze and stop working. The technology that will be used is a GPS tracker.

GPS stands for global positioning system, it is a navigational system which relies on satellite signals to show an object's location. The devices receive signals from special satellites which orbit the earth twice a day at an altitude of 13 thousand miles. two pieces of information first have to be given which is current time which is done by using an atomic clock on the satellite and a quartz clock on the device we also need to know where above the earth the satellite is, this will give us the tools to use a triangulation calculation in order to detect the distance between the receiver and the satellite which is done by comparing the time the signal left to the time it was received which will allow you the distance.

There will be a minimum of 3 satellites that are needed in order to calculate latitude and longitude however if the altitude is need then a fourth satellite should be used. My app will use GPS and location services in order to know how many wars there are on the road and at what speed they're moving. What I learned from this is that Universitas’ Indonesia's bus stops has a roof over it on order to shade the users which is good because when it rains this can be a shelter if you don’t have an umbrella and if it’s too hot then it can be used as a protection from the sun which is an advantage however it doesn’t inform the user what buses come and when the come which can waste a lot of time.

Section 2: Accordance, Mapping and constraints

This second section of my portfolio will deal with accordance, mapping and constraints as it pertains to a cooker in my house and how it makes the product easy to use.

Accordance is characteristics of a object which indicate to us how they should be used.The perceived accordance of the cooker is vague at first because the buttons are not raised so so the user can only see symbols on a black plate, it is possible that it would take awhile for the user to realise that they have to press the symbols in order for the cooker to work if they are not used to touch screen technology. However if you are used to touch screen technology then you would see the symbols and realise that they are touch screen buttons. Buttons are an accordance bus buttons are only used for pressing so the user will immediately know that this button should be used for pressing and not sliding or pulling as it is a 2D button so it completely eliminates these options. Mappings are to do with controls and their relationship to how the device works. We can see this in the the cooker as the left buttons are in relation to the hobs on the left and the right button is used for the hobs on the left.

As well as this if you look closer at the buttons they have further marks on them, these marks have an arrow on one of the corners on the squares which is to tell the user that this particular button works for the the hob on the right hand side on the top. This is useful because this allows for a low level of mistake to be made by the user, it can really only happen when the don’t look at the hob; with this there is no need for text to explain what is does or how to use it.

On control on the map is the plus sign and the minus sign which represents the heat of the hob, this is a natural mapping as the manufacturer has made use of the cultural standard which is the the plus symbol means more the the minus means less. A physical constraint is that you can only press the buttons and that is the only choice you have...you can’t turn swipe therefore this reduces the trial and error time the user will have to go through in trying to use the product. What I learned from this is that the best product in terms of usability are the ones which do not require extra words or diagrams to explain how to use them which is why this cooker is very good as it explains everything very simple way making it easy it use.

Section 3:

Hierarchical task analysis In the third section of my portfolio I will be making a hierarchical tree for the website of a flower shop. I will go into detail on to the different pages that can be accessed on the website.

What I learned from this is that it is important to break to a website in to it’s various pages so that we group the pages that link together as this makes the website easier to navigate when similar topics are clustered and linked together. Having a closed amount of pages to choose from allows for less mistakes as it’s not open ended.

Section 4: Usability test

In the last section of my portfolio I will be conducting a usability test on an east Asian comic website to see how easy it is to navigate the website, i will list a set of tasks that i want a user to carry out then i will evaluate how easy it was for them to navigate.

Tasks 1) Find the forum of the book “Kuroko No baske”

2) Find the highest rating sci-fi books

3) What is the most popular shonen book that was released in 2010?

Method for identifying problems in the website.

There is a disparity between the first task and the last two task and this is because the user had to search for a specific book so they had to type it in to the search bar. For the most part the task did not need any explaining the the problem was leaning towards the fact that the first book’s name is in Japanese and was no available in english which made the book harder to find as people couldn’t remember the name and it took them longer to type in. Therefore a printed task sheet would have been more helpful so that the users can look at it when referencing japanese books. The issue i had with recording the subjects answers were that it was paraphrased so to improve this i could use a video and not write down what they say as well as this recording the screen would be a good idea as i can track what the user actually did and see it instead of imaging it through writing which could lead to me misrepresenting the user and not solving the issue. Some alterations

that I would make to the test is that I would explain the context of the website first in order to warm the user up to the website so that they get more comfortable with it which can allow the user to used it better as they are aware of what the website is about and what the headings of the page are in reference to as they can use past experience of similar websites to use this website. Some of the biggest problems that were faced is that there was a lot of information o one page, there is pictures, flashing text and many navigation bars and shortcuts. This caused a lot of problems for the users as there is a lot of information to sift through; as well as this some of the page is in romanised Japanese which makes the information more difficult to identify.

To summarise all of my test subjects were able to find the page that they were looking for and it didn’t take too much effort for them to find it.