Lecture 12/10/07 - HCI

Human-computer interaction

Geneen started off the lecture by telling us that some of my fellow students where having difficult making the word "bounce" squash up when hit the walls of the flash application. All we had to do was add a key frame but instead of the altering the position of the word we just had to alter the width of the word. Then when you clicked play it squashed up the word when it came near the wall making it look like it had bounced off.

The main topic of today's lecture was about HCI. We use HCI in everyday use. The most common ones are windows , mac and gnome. I prefer to use mac and cant wait for the new mac os x leopard to come out in 4 days Apple. HCI stands for the interaction between humans and computers.

We then looked at some different websites to show us different HCI examples.

Poor - Radioqualla
Good - Micheal Kamen

The main aspect of a HCI must have the following....

Colour

• Optimise - (Too Much or Too Less)
• Contrast
• Colour Blindness
• Meaning (Different countries have different colour meaning) Click
  

Text

• Size
  
• Font

Icons

• Clear
  
• Meaning full

Navigation

• Easy to use

Later on in the lesson we looked at this religious website which was mind blowing to say the least. The screen had flashing colours and had things moving around at break neck speed. The font was terrible and could not be read. This was a really poor example of HCI but the whole lecture room at a laugh.

That was really the end of the lesson but Geneen managed to squeeze in a funny youtube clip which she had found.

more next time....