Evaluation of "Gamified" Systems~

The paper highlights the raising trend / demand of ICT jobs but it seems that ICT job was deem as not exciting or even boring...before even getting ppl to join ICT jobs. There were efforts required to make it more interesting to find out what really happens in ICT careers. The paper sought to examine whether “gamification” could be used to broaden learners’ knowledge of CS careers and expertise.

The authors identified the components of a gamification system and the criteria that can be used for evaluating UX, usability and education usability of such a system which is attuned to the context of South Africa's education environment. Making it more interesting to learn about Computer Science related careers and hope to improve to pick up of ICT as a career choice in South Africa.

Usability evaluation 

There was good sampling of the participants (12 pax with equal in gender ratio) in terms of numbers, age and deliberate target of non-Computer Sciences students so as to target the students whom have not been exposed to IT and not familiar with the contents of the Career website. Such deliberate selection definitely reduced biases

The evaluation was conducted in the controlled setting of a computer laboratory situated in the NMMU CS Department, as a controlled setting allows the evaluator to control the users’ activity while using a system. Participants were required to complete five tasks on the CS Careers system. The participants were encouraged to ask the evaluator (who is one of the authors of this article) for assistance should they require any throughout the evaluation.

Pro there was a good sampling with gender ratio and the deliberate attempt to focus on students whom are not IT savvy

Cons participants asking the evaluator may/could generate biasness a controlled setting / environment would require resources and time to be committed to the study

Three evaluation criteria were established: Usability, UX and Education Usability

Usability

A binary scale (1 = task success, 0 = task failure) was used to measure effectiveness for some of the measured task. 

Pro a clear distinction can be seen if a task can be completed easily and further reinforced with the time taken to complete it

Cons failures wont be able to capture what are the parts the caused difficulties / failure to complete the tasks

UX and Education Usability

A Likert scale on a 5-point scale was used to measure the UX and usability results.

Pro Relatively easy to draw conclusion with the mean, standard deviation, min and max displaced for each criteria.

Cons Different individuals may have differing scale measurements.

Eventually, all three evaluation criteria - usability, UX, and education usability - received generally favorable ratings by the usability evaluation participants, suggesting that the gamification elements enhanced the CS Careers system.

References:

Brenda Scholtz, Larissa Raga, Gavin Baxter 2016, Design and Evaluation of a "Gamified" System for Improving Career Knowledge in Computer Sciences

Being Connected Every-time and Everywhere

Ubiquitous Computing

Alignment to Moore's law, computing power / memory are getting smaller and cheaper year by year. Technology has creeped into everyone's life... gone were the days where only tech savvy individuals whom are masters of computer program could interact with computing devices via a keyboard and programming platform. These days, devices can be commanded via voice...and now they understand human language! 

SIRI was first launched in Feb 2010. it understands human speech, different languages... even can be trained to understand accents!

Users no longer need to know the complexity of search engines, location-based tracking, "Siri, I want to eat pizza for dinner, tell me where are the pizza outlets around me"

Instantaneously, SIRI acknowledge / understands the request, she retrieves your current location via GP, crawls through the web and locate pizza restaurant within 3km radius around you and displays it onto your mobile phone ! AMAZING !

SIRI removes the cognitive load of going thru different internet webpages, geographical analysis. She can even provide recommendations if you let her check the reviews on Yelp. It is so easy to use, as long as you have a voice, you would be able to engage SIRI services! 

Other than performing searches on the internet, SIRI can relate to your applications as she retrieves your chat history, photo history, play your playlist at your request.

SIRI now sits snugly within inch-scale devices like our mobile phones, they can perform computing and communications. I am a believer of the law of equilibrium, technology serves as a double edge sword. It is like everybody has a personal assistant / secretary if you think positive, OR every of your whims and fancies, decisions and actions are always being tracked. 

Wearing Your Devices

Other than talking to a digital device, taking a step further, how about wearing it and bringing it everywhere. My childhood days have this wearable device, Saiyan Tracker... it was a glimpse into the future where actual world is augmented by assessment of individual combat power values and also ability to provide geo-spatial details.

So when the google glasses was announced, i thought my childhood's coming true!

I guess it failed to gain traction with its initial high prices, lack of use cases / applications. It seemed to be too ahead of their time.

But what I loved about it was that it was a great interface to augment the interaction of a user with his/her environment. The glasses does not mask / cover the existing environment, which means users can still observe or relate to whats happening in real time. The information that is "pasted" into user's vision (or even voice in the future or vibration for notification) serves as additional medium that the device can interact with the wearer.  

Maybe the design / fashion wasn't the immediate consideration when developing the device.... which could be a factor to the low adoption rate too. But what I really thought was that the applications and users are still in the infancy stage for such wearables. I do believe as technology continues the climb, we will find further uses or even compliment wearable with other equipment (mobile phones, electronic appliances) as the world becomes more connected... Watch out for 5G is coming to connect us!

But I heard that Apple is coming up with a similar product ! Hopefully they can do better ! 

Usability Study on YouTube~

 Like carpark coupons, MediaCorp artists like Zoe Tay, Lee Nan Xing which were known as <UNBEATABLES> have been replaced by You-tubers and YouTube Channels.

My two kids (aged 8 and 10) are fans of Tan Jian Hao, Sis vs Bro (Karina and Ronald Calor), PinkFong (with their famous BabyShark). I have been converted….literally when my YouTube playlist recommendations are plastered with my kids’ preferences. YouTube must be really easy to use, even toddlers in Food courts and MRT also know how to use them… that spurred my interest to learn more on this video streaming platform.

When I found this paper that was done up in 2017, it looked at ease of use, usefulness and satisfaction of users with combination of recording videos, mouse and keyboard heat map. There were observed difficulties in using it at the first moment but users would be able to get the hang of it rather easily. It shows how usable YouTube website especially in the learnability and memorability aspects.

While This paper aims on addressing gaps in the usability of YouTube website especially for the main features such as login, upload, share, subscribe and change language, content location, and restricted mode, it was stated that all ten participants were males and 15 years old.  I would think the consideration of availability of participants and cost constraints did place a limitation on the variety on the participants’ sample group. Students with zero budget and coupled with a tight timeline, they could only rely on their course-mates and friends.

The 3 hypotheses looked at:

A.      How easy the interface was (lesser clicks means easier to navigate)

B.      How satisfied participants were with the interface

C.      How well the process flow was designed (the better, the faster they can complete the tasks)

 

What actually caught me was the suggestions:

1.       Including the sign-up button on the actual page back in 2017 and YouTube actually now has it (circled in red in screenshot below).  

2.       Allowing users to sign-up / in using other than Google Account. This functionality also been included in YouTube

1	2
3	4

 It just mean that YouTube definitely have a more comprehensive Usability Testing to ensure that even the platform keeps evolving to be one of the most enjoyed and easy to use platform.

In conclusion, based on the usability study, YouTube is well organized, clean, very useful, and easy to use, respondents were able to learn and memorize the task in short time which mean the YouTube websites is highly usable.

References:

Mohd Nur Faiz Abd Razak, Azham Hussain, & Mohd Maizan Fishol Hamdi, 2017, Usability study of youtube websites for Malaysian teenagers

Uplifting your spirits and not your blood pressure

 

Usability  Effectiveness Efficiency Safety Utility Learnability Memorability

User Experience Subjective qualities concerned with how system feels to a user Desirable Non-Desirable

To put it in layman term, Usability means how easy it is for the user to understand or complete a task with the application. Usability involves effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction enabling users to complete certain tasks as easily as possible. 

On the other hand, User experience focus on user feelings and attitudes when using or interacting with a particular product. Generically, applications would want to generate positive feelings during / after usage.

Lets go through 2 applications, one that brought me joy and amazement whilst another that challenged my cognitive abilities and may had triggered a few anxiety attacks

Parking your car

 

Many years ago, car-park payment (in Singapore) was done via paper-coupons. They required nimble hands and pre-planning on parking duration. Car owners who lack time-management skills or integrity (more likely) have lamented on how inefficient coupon purchasing and differing parking rates cause heartaches and displeasure (when they get slapped with parking fines). Enforcement was a thankless and laborious task which incur no gratuities on errand parking but only countless appeals and complaints from affluent car owners who lament on busy schedules and forgetfulness when they incur parking fines.

Parking.sg

Govtech developed a parking application to pay short-term parking charges through your mobile device at all existing coupon-based public car parks. Just key in your vehicle number, select the car park, indicate the parking duration, pay using your credit or debit card and start parking. You will also be able to extend the parking session remotely via the app.

Upon activation of the application, the nearest car-parks would be displayed to the user. A graphical map is displayed to provide a geographical location. Carpark selection is also linked via GPS to get the nearest carpark, a favorite list is made available and if the user can still access all the car parks within Singapore. Details like duration, car and cost are all displayed prior to confirmation.

Selection from list of car park nearby, key in vehicle number and choose parking duration	App will automatically calculate the parking charges and credit the charges to the credit/debit card.
app will notify when session is about to expire and user can extended parking duration via the app. If parking session ends earlier, a refund would be given on a per-minute basis

The app has a step-by-step approach with very clear / concise intend for each decision then coupled with simple instructions and confirmation. I would think it is an effective and easy-to-learn application. The payment and refund mechanism scores well on the safety feature since there won’t be wastage unlike previous paper coupons that can easily trigger over or under payment. As a user, it has been a plus for me and scored positively.

I had a stint in Certis CISCO, one of the main enforcer agencies for errant parking, this application has made the lives of the wardens much easier without the need to squint for hidden coupons, just punch in the license plate, print the parking ticket, JOB DONE~

p/s: there ain’t incentives for enforcement agencies for each parking fine… all monies are channel back to Government coffers~

Course Registration - GS LINK

Upon clearing the login page and landing at the main page, the user would have to navigate onto the <Course Registration> option. As a Masters Program student, I am pretty aware what does MBA mean but there is this EMBA (executive MBA) which I am not 100% clear until I “google-ed” but being the sensitive strawberry generation, I did not like being known as “Other Students”.

Admitting myself as a non MBA student, and after clicking onto the link, I was brought to a page which seems totally not within GS-Link. The design, fonts and essay of instructions confused me, until I saw the link (circled in red below) to the Graduate Course Registration System.

As a part-time student, class & exam schedule is very important as it's my job that would pay the school fees. Clicking onto VIew Class & Exam Schedule (All course), I was brought to a page where I had to filter through a combo box of courses. I would have thought it would offer a much better experience if the platform bothers to link my program to the schedules for my MSC(INFORMATION SYSTEMS). But after learning about cross-program selections, i can appreciate why this page with all the courses are made available.

After registration I realized that I was only limited to 3 subjects and did not fully understand how the Waiting-List operated. Hence, there were countless email enquiries and after many exchanges with the course admin staff, then I was assured that I have successfully registered for my dream courses.

GS link has actually served its purpose since it fully supported the required functions for Schedules Enquire & Registrations. But the User interface could have been enhanced with simplified instructions or structure work-flows to make it a more desirable platform for students to enjoy~

Patrick Star~

A veteran cynic whose got problem for every solution but yet the tinkerer who yearns to make this world a better place. As living organisms we react to stimuli every second, its crucial for the interaction and ease of understanding of the matter or environment we are in touch with.

Life is complicated enough, Make things simple to understand and react to

A part time student whom embodies life long learning. A decade plus of corporate experience but still miss schooling.

A veteran with a never-say-die attitude, but nearly die whenever I see how the legacy designs are being used and delivered. I want to learn how to make idiot-proof applications so that I can live long and prosper.