Which Merge is best

Why not take part in an experiment - look at these to presentations on Merge sort and tell me what you think at the end of it. 

Merge secret sauce  and the other version  

Merge sort B (all in one) 
Now tell me your preferance...

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Masters project proposal " Flat design - usability improvement or just stylistics hot air?"

I saw this debate and thought how wonderful it would be as a masters project

Working title: Flat design - usability improvement or just stylistics hot air?

General description 

Recently there has been a writing debate in the user interface community about a new style call flat design. Flat design has become a familiar on the web, under Windows 8 and the new IOS7. In many ways that design is a movement against previousskeumorphic designs, but more importantly claim that flat design produces more usable interfaces.

On the other hand leading user interface practitioners such as Jacob Nielsen have also criticized flat design. I have listed out some of the most useful websites and arguments below.

This masters project is to fairly evaluate both interfaces, and produce evidence to answer the question “does flat design improves the user experiance or not”?

 To do this your approach could be to produce two identical interfaces on the phone or web and then evaluate them with real users.

MSc and taught modules (Any relevant taught modules and specialist MSc title(s) if appropriate)

M864 Fundamentals of interaction design

Background reading 

Some open reading materials and the cases they introduce are.. 

http://techstream.org/Web-Development/Core-Principles-of-Flat-Design

• suggest that flat design will improve functionality. 
•  [The Flat design] "philosophy preaches that if something doesn't help usability, leave it out of the design. This suggests that minimal approach will improve usablity by removing unnecessary elements." 
• The simpler time also Speeds up down load times - important for better 
• Makes the content stand out which is an important factor on small screen phones/tablets.
• Simpler design takes less time and lets you spend more time getting it right and usablity. 
• Flat design includes more animation,sound,vibration. 

http://uxmag.com/articles/a-look-at-flat-design-and-why-its-significant

• flat design looks friendly and approachable to users. But it does this by presenting a clear and engaging interface, rather than disguising and warping that interface to mimic something familiar
• speedier pages, 
• cleaner code, 
• easy adaptability
• Better experience by embracing the medium (2d) rather than trying to poorly simulate another one ( 3d). 
• skeuomorphic introduces many unnecessary elements which consume valuable screen space. 
• Flat design is easier to read ‘at a glance’ 
• Improved conversion rates “What's more, flat design can help companies to achieve higher conversion rates on their website. Because of the uncomplicated design, the eye is drawn directly to calls to action buttons and the user is less likely to be distracted from their main reason for being at your website.”( http://www.wysi.co.uk/web-design-and-marketing-news-berkshire/the-benefits-of-flat-design)  

http://www.nngroup.com/articles/windows-8-disappointing-usability/

 Nielsen criticized flat style in Windows 8 as 

• reducing discoverability.
• low Information Density.
• For new users hidden interface features (charms on W8) which need to be summoned with a swipe are difficult for new users. 

http://blog.side-side.co.uk/flat-design-trend/

AA: Flat design is not memorable.

Research methods (An indication, but no need to be specific unless that is required by the topic)

To do this your approach could be to produce two identical interfaces on the phone or web and then evaluate them with real users.

Other specific information

• Deliverables: Two programs or websites which embody flat vs skeumorphic or traditional design.
• A series of tasks for the users to perform on both interfaces.
• A series of questions asking each user their preference.
• Timings and error rates for each user and each task

The difference between user experience and user interaction explained (some what)

Searching for funding for teaching research.

I've been looking for a small fund to pay to pilot a small teaching centered research project. It's harder than I thought.

It looks like both Joint Information Systems Commiteee (JISC) and the higher education academy only fund what they ask for. It's interesting how funding bodies have changed over the years. The EPSRC have a open mode when you can apply any time any where.  Clearly JISC/HEA decided to try and 'control' research by coming up with what they want promote and only funding that. Its one of those short term gains long term failure things.

Spoke to Information & Computer Sciences Higher education academy centre in Ulster. They told me they are getting shut down due to government cuts and have stopped doing things until they hear if they survive the cull. They moved the entire funding cycle up to spend the money before it got taken away from them.

They told me that there isn't really another body to apply to.

My life is all set backs at the moment.

I guess I have to wait until I see thing go by o nthe JISC conveyer belt.

Ruby on rails

This isn't about Ubi-comp. I just needed somewhere to make notes about the rub  on rails course. 

the central concept is to see how fast and light we can make the production of a new course. IN this case we are producing 5 points post grade ( assume you can program ) course about ruby on rails. 

just had a short meeting about it. What did we conclude

1. Treat the book chapters as the basic units 

questions how quickly can we get students to go through the chapter. 

        What can we add ( additional material) 

2. Interests in deployment  -

 something not done in the book

       need something like Drupal to make mutiple sub domains with seperate version of apache.  

Agreed to talk in 2 weeks time after looking at book again.  

      

M801 project Ideas

M801 Project Ideas
It takes me about a day to write one up. I thought I would dump my current idea list up.

1. People as streets. Trying to produce flat representations for non flat graphs. Get students to try to develop mechanisms to layout arbitrary graphs as axial representations.

2. [IN] Cognitive Maps ( Sketch Maps ) for long term user interface analysis. Get people to draw maps of the user interface for commonly used programs like Word or Excel ( or 3D program or IDE ). Use reference to sketch mapping ( Lynch).

4. Sketchy display of user interface elements to facilitate GUI requirements engineering.

3.Future Finder.Containment layout algorithms. How to layout rectangles in the most efficient way while not spending all day doing it.

4. ReCctor vision - implementing something in reactor vision. Embodies displays.

5. Algorithms for GPU. Thinking about concurrent program what kinds of mischief can we get up to. Searching sorting anything that isn't a graphical rendering algorithum.

6. Advanced documentation. Implement a doclet to add visualisation and getting started to java doc code.

8. CSP - a like ASP or PHP but embeds C into HTML text. Runs compiler that produces a CGI.

Masters thesis

Odd thought on the OU Masters thesis, we should give 3 thesis as a part of the masters thesis pack. The first TMA would be to mark these sample thesis against the standard marking schedule forcing them to read them critically but also providing a benchmark against what and how to write. The effective writing package they have at the momement is to generic to the point of obscurity.

java nuisance of the day.

Strange how the string class ( which is final) has methods that do very neat find and replace.

YET the stringBuilder class - that is something that is mutable only has simple find and replace operatoins.

So if you wnat to do a find and replace on a large string java WANTS you to make a huge copy not operate in place. Perhaps the garbage collector needs more work.

back to TMA.

thought about teaching

Naturaly there is a lot of thinking about teaching here. One thing I noticed was this big move recently to move towards a process called 'reflection'. I don't see the process of reflection as being a huge contribution to the educational process and certainly not enough to justify the additional work load involved.

There are only ad-hoc mechanisums to consider work load when proposing new concepts in teaching it is treated as a peripheal aspect to education. I think their is a lot to be said to intoduce time and its utilisation to the core of pedigocial theory. This way a development that reduces the time it takes to learn something would be given more signficance than it currently recives.

I thought of a good way to produce not quite the null hypothosis for reflection. I would give students sample thesis/essays to comment upon/mark. This would work for a number of reasons.
1 - Given examples of good and bad work students get a better idea of what they are doing and how far they could go.
2 - Promotes the concept of promoting a coherant argument through the work ( sadly missing )
3 - Needs some understanding of the topic matter requireing research

this is in some ways the exact opposit of reflection and I quite like the idea of using the original mark given as a way of testing student...

looks like the blogger spell checker is not working.