HCI subject at UTS with Dr. Toni Robertson

In Archive, Experience Design by Fredy Ore

I started my HCI postgraduate subject at UTS last night with Dr. Toni Robertson. Here is the list of recommended readings/books:

1. Preece, Jenny, Yvonne Rogers, Hellen Sharp (2001), Interaction Design: Beyond Human Computer Interaction, Wiley.

2. Krug, Steve (2000) Don’t Make Me Think, Que, USA

3. Nielsen Jakob (1999) Designing Web Usability. New Riders Publishing.

4. Preece, Jenny, Yvonne Rogers, Hellen Sharp, David Benyon, Simon Holland and Tom Carey (1994) Human-Computer Interaction, Addison-Wesley, UK.

I am really looking forward to getting into this subject, particularly as we will be looking at emerging mobile technology usability, experience and human -extension.

Here is a synopsis:

Interaction Design (ID) is defined as designing interactive products to support people in their everyday and working lives.

This entails creating user experiences that enhance and extend the way people work, communicate and interact. ID extends the traditional focus of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) beyond designing computer systems for a single user sitting in front of a single machine.

One of the central challenges is to keep abreast of technological development, to understand the usability issues associated with these and to use this understanding to ensure that technology is harnessed for maximum human benefit.

This subject focuses on user-centred approaches to, and methods for, technology design. It provides students with an understanding of the principles of HCI as well as concepts, tools and techniques that can assist in the creation of both useful and usable technology that supports users? activities.

The subject introduces both the social and the technological aspects of HCI as well as usability design and evaluation methods.

What is Network Based Integration?

In Archive by Fredy Ore

Network Based Integration referes to the way in which software is developed and in relation to the way the developed software meets the needs of the system.
The architecture of the software being developed must be designed to conform to those needs, not the other way around. It is this software design that currently is debated particularly in relation to the development of Open-Source software and
other types.
I came across an article which covered this topic, and commented on the classification of software architecture design styles. The article comments on whats is described as Network Based Integration :::
Chapter 2 – Network-based Application Vs. Distributed based: http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/net_app_arch.htm
Chapter 3 – Network-based Architectural Styles: http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/net_arch_styles.htm

The future cyber wars

In Archive by Fredy Ore

An interesting article in CNN.com on future cyber wars that will develop as technology advances. The article covered the topic of misleading information, the internet and information overload.

“Warfare is less and less about pushing men and machines around the battlefield and more and more about pushing electrons and photons,” said Loren Thompson, a defense analyst with the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Virginia.

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PNG & CSS power at Youngpup.net

In Archive by Fredy Ore

I revisit Youngpup.net looking for some mega cool use of Styles and I came across some interesting articles on PNG ::: http://www.youngpup.net/?request=/snippets/sleight.xml
PNG stands for Portable Network Graphics and is an extensible file format for lossless, portable, well-compressed raster images. PNG is a patents free replacement to GIF. It has an optional alpha channel for transparency and its sample depths range from 1 to 16 bits per component (up to 48bit images for RGB, or 64bit for RGBA).
On a more historical point, PNG began in New Year’s Day 1995 when Unisys and CompuServe suddenly announced that programs implementing GIF would require royalties, because of Unisys’ patent on the LZW compression method used in GIF.
::: http://www.youngpup.net for a historical walkthrough of the PNG format visit Greg Roelofs The Story of PNG.

Selling Information Architecture

In Archive by Fredy Ore

A really useful and interesting article in Digital Web Magazine which comments on the task of selling user-centred IA.

The problem with ?selling information architecture? is that too often it is assumed that people want Web sites, or that people want wireframes, or a content matrix, or a taxonomy. People don?t want any of these things, even though they say that they want them or might think that they need them.

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