Activity 1
After the discussion with the tutor, we came into conclusion that I will make a website about car reviews, which featured blog entries. A website template will be based on YolaWebsite, layouts, designs and other styles are designed by Yola. Database might also be included to store membership details and user authentication, for example, login and password form. This will be discuss later in the week. Shout box will be included for users to share their opinion and/or comments on the website, and greetings to each other.Project is estimated to be complete in 5 weeks time and to be hand-in both report and website in week 9. Further changes can be occur during week 5 through 9, and an approval is needed from tutor to make these changes.
Activity 2
Understanding emotions is important in HCI because onscreen objects have the potential to activate primitive emotional responses. In other words, pictures, advertisements, web layout and design affect user's emotional responses, for example, users experience joy, fear, and sadness.
There are four possible effects of emotions:
- Attention: users direct and focus attention on onscreen objects.
- Memory: users remembered those positive and negative events.
- Performance: users perform better when they are with joy.
- Assessment: users judge their own creation positively when they are happy.
Activity 3
Some of the social practices supported in mySpace services are:
- Mirroring: behaviors of other members to fit into new group.
- Word of Mouth: passing news to participate in the community.
- Flirtation: shows that members is friendly communicate.
- Collaboration: members contribute to a community.
- Opinionating: members can express their opinion of response they solicit.
- Self-Promotion: members promote themselves usually tailored to an audience.
- Extending trust: members can tell how far a member has gone with offering of trust.
- Peer Selection: members are with who they are with.
- Public Journaling: members has "private" journal entries.
- Stylistic Displays: sign of styles are important way of establishing one's identity.
- Web Competence: shows that number of members raised during the internet age.
Activity 4
a). How to improve your product?
In my circumstances, this means that the user's requirement, user's need, user's analysis would be needed to imporve the product. To be able to know what the user want, how the user used and cooperate with the website, and how does the user feels about the website after used it, it is very important to know these, and it will help to improve the product to the next level.
b). After having my uni friend browse the other blog website, I found that usually he knows that the navigation link is on the left hand side of the page, and from knowing that, whenever after he typed the web address he always move the cursor to the left of the screen. From this observation, I can use it to improve my website and move the navigation to the left hand side.
c).
From these three data gathering techniques; interviews, questionnaires, and observation, I would choose questionnaires because it is the most effective to get participants to answers the questions, and to know what the users want on the product.
Interview: This could take huge amount of times but could be effective as well as the questionnaires. Interview on what experience and/or what is their perspective on the website they had visited.
Questionnaires: In my opinion, I think questionnaires is the most effective and less time consuming to get the final result of the user's need. Questions are based on what is should and should not be on the website.
Observation: This is almost the same as the interview because it also time consuming to observe many people which later get result. Observation can obtain information on how the user interact with the website.
d). Informed consent is not required and not needed because my relationship with the user group is uni friend.
e). I would choose questionnaires for data gather as it would take less time consuming as I had mention in the previous question.
g). I would choose observation next time because you can see how the user interacts with the website and from that you can improve your website better.
