Showing posts with label User Interface Design. Show all posts

Webvideo: The Road to Suleman Shahid's PhD

As one of the final assignments for the course Business Information Technology we had to make a webvideo including one of our teachers. We immediately knew we wanted to interview Suleman Shahid, our teacher for User Interface Design, since he really inspired us. Moreover, we were very curious about his past education and his almost finished PhD about emotions in games. Here you can see the video we made. Hope you like it.

We want to thank Suleman for his cooperation with the interview.

Stufficient App: making a students' life efficient

In one of my first blogposts I told about the lack of usability on Blackboard. Many students experience problems while using Blackboard: where to find deadlines, homework and activities? Besides students use Blackboard, they mainly have an agenda for the planning of other activities. To integrate a person’s school and social life, we designed the iPhone application Stufficient for the course User Interface Design. This application enables students to manage their courses, homework and deadlines in an agenda, make a to-do list, register for exams and check their results. But above all, this application can be personalized to meet the needs of any student.

Here are some previews of the different phases and our final design, however the real app will be kept secret until after the User Interface Design Symposium on may 18.

After a lot of brainstorm session we finally made a so-called low-fi design with the main functions of our app. First we pretested the app on paper. We wrote a few scenarios and let some respondents test these functions by clicking on them. After that a new screen was showed. Above you can see a preview of this phase.

Thanks to the low-fi evaluation we made some little changes to improve the application. Then we made our final design in photoshop. Finally, we had to program the whole application. Some screenshots are shown below.

If you want to see the real working application, please visit my website after may 18 or come to the User Interface Design Symposium to see our application and the projects of our classmates.

Saturday, April 23, 2011 // Labels: User Interface Design // 0 comments //

Usability, or the lack of it, on Blackboard

It is quite of an understatement to say most students do not like blackboard. There is even a Death to Blackboard-page on Facebook (yes, seriously!) and when you google for 'blackboard frustrations' you'll find a document written by the University of Hartford called: 'Strategies for Faculty to Forestall Student Complaints and Frustrations with Blackboard'. Seeing this document I was wondering, why people put so much effort in using a program that's so hard to work with. Everybody seems to have some difficulties with blackboard and the study guide: finding deadlines, enrolling for courses, choose which courses to follow in the next semester, sign up for exams, setting the week schedule and so on. Luckily in my first week at the University I had a special course in which we learned how to use blackboard, but I was wondering why there should even be a course like that. I think a program that you have to use on daily basis should be naturally to use, since the intention of the program is to make the life of students and teachers easier.

Thus, when we had to choose a topic for our User Interface Design project, we immediately thought of improving blackboard, but then in a totally different way. We is by the way: Elsa Jonkers, Jamie van den Eijnden, Eline Jansen, Evelyn van Kelle and me. For this course we will not be redesigning blackboard, but we will be designing a Tilburg University App for iPhone, iPod, iPad, Blackberry and Android. This app will contain a personal agenda with personal courses, all important deadlines, options to choose new courses and minors, enroll and sign up for courses and more easy-to-use functions. We want to design a timesaving and more fun way for students to organize everything concerning their study.

Therefore I would like to know from you: what are you biggest frustrations with blackboard, what functions you think are hard to use and what options would you like to see within an app? Please post your comment on this blog, since that will really help us designing our app. And maybe sharing it, will even help you to get rid of your pent frustrations. Off course I will keep you updated about the project via twitter and my blog.

By the way, within three days the new version of Blackboard, Learn 9.1, will be launched at our University. So, let's keep our fingers crossed and hope for the best!