Assignment Sample on Human-Computer Interaction

Introduction

The varying age of education and technology lead to the birth of several innovations. At present, the best technologies, available in the market for education purposes are found in different forms. The main task of the Learning Management System is involving and determining the process of utilising technology resources at an optimal level for enhancing student learning. LMS or Learning Management System is such an advancement that takes education to the next level. Being widely implemented in the corporate world, Learning Management System is utilised inadequately in Holmes Institute.

The Learning Management System is established by Holmes Institute, for connecting faculties and students without the boundaries of the traditional classroom. The system preserves a positive effect on students, where it is utilized. But, somewhere, the lack of resources and several other significant factors confines them in utilising LMS to full potential. The report provides insights into LMS, which is considered as a communication tool and promising information, for Holmes Institute.

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Discussion

User Analysis and user variation

LMS or Learning Management System is basically a toolbox of programs or a set of software tools determined to support course administration, learning and teaching for delivering, managing and tracking education and providing users online training. LMS is an online Portal used by Holmes Institute for connecting faculties and students. It provides students with an opportunity of accessing classroom materials or other activities, that can be shared easily. It helps faculties and students in interacting with each other, discussing through forums, which can take much time and affect in the time scheduled for the learning process.

The educational system in Australia is currently undergoing a massive transformation for e-revolution. For speedy advancement of Internet Technology and a wide variety of usage, incorporation of Learning Management System in education is a viable and reasonably priced option (Walker et al., 2016). It becomes increasingly clear, that WWW or World Wide Web challenges the formal or traditional education system. Internet transforms the way, Holmes Institute access information. There arises speculation, that the changing way, where the younger generation is communicating and learning, identifies them as a social person.

Student of Holmes Institute at present is familiarized to receiving information in various formats regularly, which challenges educators and engage them in enhancing learning outcomes. Internet supersedes the traditional or formal text-based learning approach. ICT tools open doors for E-learning (next-generation learning). Holmes Institute has started adopting LMS for supporting E-learning. E-learning is the utilisation of various electronic media, information and communication technologies (ICT), and various other educational technology (Bystrova et al., 2015). E-learning helps users in utilising devices, technology, and tools such as the internet, LMS, and CDs for creating an interactive learning environment which will increase the process of information sharing, and increase productivity.

LMS or Learning Management System leads to various issues, such as restriction in uploading course materials in the website and using interactive features like Chat (email, messages, discussion forum). Various interactive features are available in the Learning Management System. But the capacity of use is limited for the commitment of both faculties and students in a particular time frame. There is a gap between the reality as well as various advanced teaching tools provided in the Learning Management System. The teaching tools like multimedia materials are considered to be a possible mean that enhances teaching. For bridging the gap, LMS should be improved to be adaptive as well as customizable.

Improving LMS will help faculties or instructors in improving computer skills (Clark & Mayer, 2016). LMS should assure that all users (be it faculties or students) are comfortable with the technology. LMS need to deal with user variation like age or language skills. It may happen that users are not comfortable with the default language set to the system. So, it is expected that LMS provides users with the option of selecting language they are comfortable with. LMS also deals with age variation. According to the age group of users, provided to the system, LMS shows search results. Learning Management System of Holmes Institute is quite efficient as well as beneficial. 

Identifying the tasks potential users perform

The potential users of the Learning Management System of Holmes Institute are:

Administrators: Administrators of LMS of Holmes Institute are given the responsibility to manage LMS, involving a combination of numerous tasks, includes the creation of courses, learning plans, assign definite learner groups for particular learning plans and tracks learners’ progress (Islam, 2016).

Faculties: Faculties are those users of Holmes Institute who can access student’s details, updating class routines, uploading class notes and marks, checking student’s attendance, uploading reports and more.

Learners: Learners are on the receiving end of learning initiatives. They are the main users to whom, learning as well training programs are proposed to. Learners having access to LMS or Learning Management System, are capable of going through the course catalogue, completing assigned courses, or any sorts of evaluation and measuring their own progress (Aparicio et al., 2016). Holmes Institute assigns learners training on an individual basis, or as per job function or checking learner’s role in the organizational structure.

Staffs: Staffs are those users of the Learning Management System, who are capable of accessing the details of fee structures of students, attendance system, salary structure of faculties, faculty allocation, and more. They login to the system as a user of LMS and prepare their operation. They are able to access both faculty records as well as students’ records like administrators do.

Learning Management System of Holmes Institute manages all the operations as expected and provides the following advantages:

• Reducing development and learning costs
• Cutting down training, and on-boarding time for administrators, faculties and learners or students
• Leveraging AI to free-up time for Holmes’ Administrators
• Maintaining compliance
• Tracking learning progress
• Measuring how learning influences organizational performance

For learners, various advantages provided by the Learning Management System are:

• Increasing knowledge retention
• Acquiring skills and knowledge important for career advancement
• Improving performance

System requirements

Number of devices required: number of stems required depends on the number of users in Holmes Institute

Screen Size: 15.6 inches or 39.62 cm (For, Laptop screen)

Different screens to display: Desktop screens, Laptop Screens, Mobile screens

Colours: RED (RGB: (255,0,0)), GREEN (RGB: (0, 255, 0)) and BLUE (RGB: (0,0, 255))

UI/UX design

Efficient design and implementation of applications may include profound positive implications for accuracy, efficiency, productivity and satisfaction. Some people are aware of UI design, before but do not get any chance of utilizing it. The importance of effective application design is neither a good idea nor a good feature. The importance is gained from UX (User Experience) and UI (User Interface). It never matters what is the idea of organization, in case the app or online website looks horrible and impossible to use.

In case the organization develops a mobile application or web application, one important thing, the organization have to keep in mind is the design and function of the app. The page, user application goes through when they open the app is the home page. The home page is the initial point through which application users understand whether the application or site is meeting their requirements and fulfilling the needs. The application is attractive and includes some call-to-action button to help users in performing the operation. For adding value to UI or UX designers, the users get to know about some interesting comparison between UI and UX comparison:

• UX designer: UX designer takes care of their users and helps business in improving measurable parameters. A UX designer is capable of understanding user behaviour and analysing business needs for converting it to user flows.
• UI designer: UI designer acts as a decorator. The designer focuses on the interface that reflects the brand. It is more like an un-measurable thing. A UI designer knows the details of colour as well as colour combinations, converting them to UI elements.

A UI designer and a UX designer can be the same person who is responsible for the whole design process.

UI design: An interface is defined as the mechanism of interaction between two systems. A user interface is created to facilitate direct interaction among the user and the system.

User interfaces can be categorized into two types for display device:

CLI (Command Line Interface): include only texts, utilised by programmers

GUI (Graphical User Interface): applied by users, comprised of icons, images, menus and windows

UI or User Interface design is the discipline that enables the organization to design user interfaces for computers, and other electronic devices like mobile devices, by focusing on aesthetics and responsiveness and increasing usability for fostering an effective user experience. UI design focus on colours as well as typography. The UI design is combined with interaction design and visual design. UI design presents a common hierarchy and visual language for enhancing users to connect to the product. UI brings the concepts of Interaction Design, Information Architecture as well as Visual design together. The elements of User Interface are comprised of buttons, checkboxes, icons, message boxes, sliders and tags etc.

Importance of UI/UX design

• Design of applications as well as websites bears special challenges:
• Facilitate convoluted tasks as well as workflows
• Enable users in comprehending and managing complex data
• Accommodate various user needs, processes and roles

Design Principles for UI

Creation of UI prototype helps a good designer in following 6 user interface design principles:

Feedback: Users need to understand all condition changes, relevant actions, errors or exceptions in a precise way

Reuse: The design should be capable of reusing external as well as internal components, and maintains consistency with purpose instead of arbitrary consistency

Simplicity: The design needs to prepare tasks easily and simply, by communicating clearly and simply in the user’s language. The shortcuts should be meaningful.

Structure: Structure is related to the overall user interface architecture and it states that all the models are to be clear, consistent as well as recognizable and should include all related things.

Tolerance: The UI design is flexible and, is capable of reducing mistakes and misuse with the option of undoing and redoing.

Visibility: UI design removes all the odd alternatives as well as redundant information. The design should create all options and materials required for a given task.

UI techniques:

UI technique combines both hardware as well as software elements for providing users with a way of accomplishing a single task. The most important UI techniques are:

• Interaction styles such as form filling, menu selection and more
• Interaction design patterns which will demonstrate a way of describing solutions for accessibility or usability problems to a certain context

UI prototyping:

Prototypes are completely different from mock-ups and wireframes. Prototypes should be of high fidelity and must be interactive and fit to the user interface, as the prototypes are usually utilised by users is testing a product. The various types of UI software prototyping used for this project are:

Paper prototyping: Sketching or paper prototyping mainly stores ideas (generally on paper) and is confined to communication and generating idea with the design team.

Low-fidelity prototype: The prototypes are rough representations of concepts which enable validation of the concepts earlier in concept design. Low fidelity prototype is a raw presentation of ideas and is utilised by design teams for emphasizing interactions as well as thoughts. The characteristics of the low-fidelity prototype are:

• Content: Including only the key elements
• Interactivity: Simulating prototype by a real human, and the person being familiar with design behaves like a computer at the time of testing
• Visual design: Presenting visual attributes of the product

Advantages and Disadvantages

• Clarifying
• Collaborative
• Fast
• Inexpensive
• Limited interactivity
• Uncertainty at the time of testing

High-fidelity prototype: the prototype needs more time, resources and specialised skills. The high-fidelity prototype is an interactive prototyping, which presents realism and usability together. The main characteristics of the high-fidelity prototype are:

• Content: Designers utilising realistic content, and prototype presenting most of the content in the final design
• Interactivity: High-fidelity prototypes are realistic in interactions
• Visual Design: Detailed and realistic design

Advantages and Disadvantages:

• Clients and stakeholders buy-in
• Meaningful feedback at the time of usability testing
• Testability of specific interactions as well as UI elements
• Higher costs

Feedback Method (Questionnaire Survey):

Q1. How far do you think that the prototype designed is suitable for the LMS?

• Strongly Agree
• Agree
• Neutral
• Disagree
• Strongly Disagree

Q2. How far do you think the fidelity prototype design of LMS is perfect?

• Strongly Agree
• Agree
• Neutral
• Disagree
• Strongly Disagree

Q3. How far do you think fidelity prototype function as expected?

• Strongly Agree
• Agree
• Neutral
• Disagree
• Strongly Disagree

Q4. Do you think fidelity prototype is suitable for LMS?

• Strongly Agree
• Agree
• Neutral
• Disagree
• Strongly Disagree

Q5. Do you think fidelity prototype should be removed?

• Strongly Agree
• Agree
• Neutral
• Disagree
• Strongly Disagree

Recommendation

Some key features that are to be included in LMS of Holmes Institute are:

Artificial Intelligence: An AI engine, helps in personalizing the learning experience for each student and offers them course formats that suit best for them. The AI engine suggests learners or students’ courses with relevant topics that are already covered.

Automated Admin Tasks: Features of automated admin tasks help administrators in automating recurring or tedious tasks like deactivation, group enrolment, new user population and user grouping.

Catalogue and course management: A LMS or Learning Management System at its core, is the main system holding all course content as well as e-learning courses (Shneiderman et al., 2016). Administrators can create and manage courses as well as course catalogues for delivering targeted learning.

Certifications and Retraining: LMS or Learning Management System should allow management and tracking of all activities related to certifications and retraining. The activities are performed by managing continuing education, recurring training and compliance programs.

Gamification: The feature of gamification increases learner engagement, and allow learners in achieving awards, badges and points based on learning activities.

Integrations: Syncing all organizational data with Learning Management System, and allowing third-party integrations with other platforms like video conference tools and Salesforce CRM (Choma et al., 2016).

Content Integration and Interoperability: Learning Management Systems or LMS need to support learning content-packed as per interoperable standards like AICC, SCORM and xAPI.

Content Marketplace: Allowing administrators and learners in accessing, browsing and purchasing courses from content providers in the learning platform.

Conclusion

The report is prepared for discussing Learning Management System of Holmes Institute. The report elaborated user analysis and user variation. The report discussed the functions of potential users of Holmes Institute’s LMS. The potential users of LMS are administrators, learners or students, faculties and staffs. System requirements such as a number of display units, the colour of UI, size of devices’ screen etc are discussed in the report. The paper illustrated the UI (or User Interface) design of LMS in Holmes Institute. It shows the low-fidelity prototype as well as the high-fidelity prototype.

References

Aparicio, M., Bacao, F., & Oliveira, T. (2016). An e-learning theoretical framework. An e-learning theoretical framework, (1), 292-307.

Bystrova, T. Y., Larionova, V. A., Osborne, M., & Platonov, A. M. (2015). Introduction of an open e-learning system as a factor of regional development. R-Economy. 2015. Vol. 1. Is. 4, 1(4), 587-596.

Choma, J., Teixeira, R. L. B., Guerra, E. M., & Da Silva, T. S. (2016, November). Interaction patterns for user interface design of large web applications. In Proceedings of the 11th Latin-American Conference on Pattern Languages of Programming (p. 8). The Hillside Group.

Clark, R. C., & Mayer, R. E. (2016). E-learning and the science of instruction: Proven guidelines for consumers and designers of multimedia learning. John Wiley & Sons.

Islam, A. N. (2016). E-learning system use and its outcomes: Moderating role of perceived compatibility. Telematics and Informatics, 33(1), 48-55.

Shneiderman, B., Plaisant, C., Cohen, M., Jacobs, S., Elmqvist, N., & Diakopoulos, N. (2016). Designing the user interface: strategies for effective human-computer interaction. Pearson.

Walker, D. S., Lindner, J. R., Murphrey, T. P., & Dooley, K. (2016). Learning management system usage. Quarterly Review of Distance Education, 17(2), 41-50.