Exercise 1: Usability
Date: Summer Term 2007
In the lecture, we were talking about the termusability. Organize yourself in couples; one has to think loudly while doing the exercise, the other one is supposed to take notes.
Unit 1: Search for the telephone number of Ralf Salomon, Thomas Vergin, Bernd Kreike- mayer, and Alke Martens, starting at the following websites
1. http://www.uni-rostock.de
2. http://www-md.e-technik.uni-rostock.de
Hint:you arenotsupposed to usegoogleor any other search functionality!
Note the number of clicks needed. Please, note also the miss clicks and stop at 12 clicks. How could the search be improved?
Try to find where the office of Wolfgang Roßmannek is.
Unit 2: You are working with KDE (Linux). Write a text document and store it in the Docu- ments folder. Note your thoughts and steps including all failures.
Unit 3: Start the programkorganizer. Create an entry for the 1st of July 2007. Create another entry for the period starting at the 1st of August and ending at the 10th of September 2007. Modify the entry of the 1st of July 2007, e.g., another time or another subject. Show the period between the 8th and the 10th of June in the day/week display.
Unit 4: Create a “toy” programjojoby typing in the following commands:
echo ’echo hi there’ > jojo chmod 755 jojo
and try it by typing injojo. Create the following “links:”
1. a link to run thejojo-program from the desktop (background) 2. a link to run thejojo-program from the panel (bottom line)
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Wrap-up: The web provides a large amount of material about usability aspects. A good place to start is http://usability.gov/guidelines. Go ahead and browse the following sections:
1. the usage of color: chapter 3, section 3 and chapter 11, section 1 2. considering the resolution of the user’s screen: chapter 4, section 5 3. text appearence: chapter 11, sections 7 and 8
Have fun, Stefan and Ralf.
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