From the Syllabus...

Course Description (2 units)

Studies in human computer interaction (HCI) revolve around the ways in which people directly interact with computers.  This course covers an historical overview of the field, the process of developing interactive systems, interacting with computers, psychology and human factors, and research frontiers.  The course follows the shift away from the deterministic model of computer as 'object', and develops and understanding of the notion of technology as a 'socially shaped' phenomenon.

General Objectives

• Discuss theory and development of HCI
• Identify and explore current issues in HCI
• Evaluate human /computer limitations including accessibility issues
• Design Interactions by applying HCI principles and processes
• Collaborate on HCI projects using best practices and research
• Identify HCI trends and predict future issues

This is the HCI course with Paul Sparks, Ph.D.  The first two readings were pretty good.  Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug was a fast read (just a couple of hours) and had some very to-the-point suggestions about web page layout and web site designs.  On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins was a little slower read, but was very insightful on how the brain actually (possibly) works.  The Preece book is a tough read...it's written using a small font and APA style double-spacing, urgh.

And no...I'm not really sure what he's wearing on his head.  Hmmm.

I was recently reading James' blog and he mentioned embedded chips for processing payments.  Reminded me of the poster I saw in the LA airport when I left town after the first F2F.  It was just an advertisement for IBM, but the concept was of a new (currently non-existent, but not unrealistic) type of HCI. 

It's a simple band-aid strip monitoring device which displays blood type, blood pressure, pulse, cholesterol, signal quality, battery strength, etc. And it looks like it's disposable...sweet. 

Yes...I'm "blogging".  I'm generally a "lurker" in blogs, posting an occasional response, but never authoring a blog.  But, one of the assignments in this class is to create a blog and participate in other students' blogs.

Initially I decided to blog on the "Computer Experience" within the doctoral program, and more specifically the things relevant to the HCI course.  But, as the semester progressed, I decided to angle it towards journaling my adventures in Second Life. 

I'm going to keep journaling my experience over the rest of the semester, but I might even find a desire to continue to contribute to the blog through the remaining school year...as the next year also has an HCI course!.  We'll see.  

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2nd Year Update: Seems my blogging (actually my journalistic writings) on Second Life caught on. I was asked to help out with the Entrepreneurial course being taught at Georgia State University during the Fall of 2008. So I've rewritten some of my earlier "blog" stuff and I'm using that material (and some new stuff) to help guide a bunch of 4th year students through Second Life.  See the MGS4500GSU site for Insights from Xyek (my avatar).

2nd-3rd Year Update: Late in my 2nd year, as my consultancy course was underway, I've found my "blogging niche" -- it's in the area of my volunteer work of resume reviews and writing.  This will probably be a continuing activity even after my program.  See my MrL8Nite Job Hunter Blog for my writings and rantings.

Using the site design guidance based on the Krug book mentioned above, one of the goals of this class is to build/rebuild a site that incorporates the "Don't Make Me Think" standard of web-page design.  So, the first thing I had to decide was, do I keep my old website and try to fix it or do I simply implement a new site from scratch. The old site has been around for several years – it’s my Trayser.com site that had become a "junkyard" of sorts. I thought it might be more effort to dig through the old Dreamweaver code on that site and clean it up than what it would be worth. The other choice was to start a new site and not lose the valuable time I needed for other coursework. In the end I decided to take both approaches...the old and the new. I'd put some stuff on the old site and “tinkered” with it slightly, but also built a new site with current Web-enabled tools.

For a "topic", I envisioned taking all my current Pepperdine-related course stuff and build a new web site.  I wanted to avoid the challenges of Dreamweaver or other PC-based toolsets, so I focused on selecting sites with built-in WYSIWYG page editors.  I also checked out several sites that were free  and decided on www.freewebs.com for a variety of reasons (simple editor, all the basic features, ads were "tame", works for Mac and PC, etc.). The toolset they provide is very basic but feature-rich enough to get a reasonable website going in only an hour or two. I created pages for each course, a blog, a pics page, a home page, an "about me" page, and will probably build a few others.  (You’re obviously already here, but the link is: www.freewebs.com/mrl8nite)

The freewebs site is very simple to use and the WYSIWYG editor is straight forward. Developing the basic features proved easy, so launching a functional site was quick, but the page layout and other features of the site are limited to the templates provided.  For example, the navigation bar down the left side of the side is strictly 1-level...in essence every page is at the same level as the homepage.  While this simplifies the site’s support challenges, it limits the layout of more complex site structures. Luckily this isn’t an issue at this time.  Also, the navbar can’t be customized or deployed in other formats, such as tabs or nested buttons. Ultimately I’ll have to abandon freewebs for something more robust (unless they enhance it), but for this semester it meets the needs of the course.

That addressed the "new", but I still had the "old" I wanted to touch up. I had gathered some information on Barbecuing over the years and I wanted to put it some place “centralized”. I decided that since it wasn't exactly school related, I'd build my BBQ site under my old site.  That went rather well, even though I had to struggle with Dreamweaver and FTP.  I used a simple on-page navigation and I think it works fairly well. I never considered myself an HTML programmer, so the struggle with Dreamweaver and coding the source of some pages is proving tedious.  I also didn’t want to have to rip out the whole site, which meant I decided to leave the top pages alone and only focus on the sub-pages of what I called the "GrillBQ" site: www.trayser.com/grillbq/GBQ_index.html

I think the GrillBQ site is showing some benefits some from the Krug concepts, but it is still a work-in-progress. I have so far enhanced the navigation, tinkered with the colors (still not happy…trying to get a BBQ sauce color on the pages), and have some logical structure. But on the down-side, I find that struggling with page formats such as tables and multi-column stuff to be overly time consuming.  I will continue to make improvements on this site and may, one day, redesign the whole thing. In the meantime I will abandon any further work on this page in favor of the freewebs site for further HCI-related materials.

When scoring the freewebs site (this site) by the “Don’t Make Me Think” standard, how does it stand up? For navigation, it’s a compromise between ordering the site in a logical manner using the rather plan (but effective) navigation bar and using a few bottom-of-page navigation links to facilitate jumping through the site. The template (colors, fonts, background) I chose looks good at various resolutions and on both a PC and Mac. The basic pages that most sites commonly have (home, about, pics, etc.) were easy to build and integrate with the look-and-feel of the site, and even a basic blog feature was available, but the wiki had to be hosted elsewhere and thus couldn’t blend with the web site as well.  The layout of the pages are simplistic, so it restricts how things can be moved around the pages...resulting in a distinctly top-down page layout. So the compromise between keeping the structure of the content of the site clear and carefully using its limited layout features produced a no-confusion site that I think would pass the basic elements of Krug’s usability test.

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