02/11/07 - 08/11/07

This weeks lecture was taken by Daniel Cunliffe who I think is taking over our lectures for the next few weeks at least. He talked a lot about what we did in the tutorial from my last blog entry about the usability checklist and also about how technology has evolved over the years. I looked up the evolution of technology on google and found this website :
http://ezinearticles.com/?The-Evolution-of-Technology---The-History-of-Computers&id=16046
It basically goes right from the beginning and builds up to how computers have developed up until now which just helped me expand on what was talked about in the lecture. It was a pretty straightforward lecture as we'd already been through the good / bad points of the usability checklist in the tutorial and I'd already done a bit of extra research on it as shown in my last post. However he added to it by talking about how technology has evolved which besides having it's own significance also added emphasis to that fact that the checklist is somewhat outdated as it was produced in 1998.

The tutorial was taken in a similar way to last weeks as we were put into groups and had to answer questions on using design guidelines and how useful / suitable they are. We had to examine the university website against the criteria given in the guidelines given on two web sites and decide whether it conforms to their guidelines. We found that although the guidelines on both websites appeared usable and sensible they weren't suitable for every type of website available, an example of this being You Tube. We also discussed the answers given by different groups enabling us to see how we could have looked at it a different way or even just expanded a bit more on our own ideas on it.
I also found another article from the same website I used for expansion on the lecture, but this one was based on basic web page design guidelines:
http://ezinearticles.com/?Basic-Web-Design-Guidelines&id=701581

Although both the tutorial and lecture were similar to the previous weeks, I benefitted from both because the lecture just helped me expand on my knowledge of usability checklists while also learning something new in how technology has evolved. The tutorial was benefitial beacause although it was taken in a similar way, it was based on a different topic (design guidelines instead of usability checklists) and by talking about it as a group it enabled everyone to see different points that perhaps they didn't think of themselves.