*Note: This post only acts as an online archive, no specific purpose whatsoever. And yeah, it’s quite a scroll.*

FINAL PROJECT ABSTRACT OF UNDERGRADUATE PROGRAM
NIM : 13505***
Name : Umi Fadilah W. Syam
Lecturer : Ir. Dwi Hendratmo, M.Sc., Ph.D
Title : “Pengembangan Perangkat Bantu Peraga Pengajaran Interaksi Manusia Komputer”

ABSTRACT Human Computer Interaction (HCI) relates to a field study orientated in the evaluation process of usability aspects of a system/product. As people tried to apply HCI onto everyday’s lives, they begin to realize that developing a system based on HCI doesn’t end only when the user’s goal has been successfully achieved, but furthermore it needs to be maximized with what is widely known as a good ”user experience”. Achieving towards the secondary objective may result in facing obstacles vary from the wide range of HCI’s theories as well as interaction design theories, which seems too abstract and at some point make them more difficult to learn without any delineation. And the fact remains, there are still no interactive tool that act as an aggregator for learning these materials. Our study shows that even if there are some tool available at the market, mostly acts uninteractive and appertain smaller scope of HCI theories.

According to the former cause, this final project focuses on developing a tool which helps visualize the aspects within HCI learning materials, by providing wide range of former tools that have been developed by others before, and then map them onto related topic of HCI curriculum. The curriculum will later be formulated through comparison between HCI’s curricula being used in ITB and few major curricula applied in Stanford and Maryland University.

A tool named ”HCI Learning Tool” is a web-based application which delineatively helps people in understanding what HCI is about, by dividing former tools into 5 different category: Video, Audio, Software, Document, and Web-Based. HCI Learning Tool is expected to become an additional supplement tool beside regular course material learnt by each student, emphasizing the possibilities of HCI self-learning beyond textbook and all stuff. By the end of this final project will be summarized into an evaluation process using usability testing, to measure usability of the system as well as how much have the user experience gained. Final result shows that HCI Learning Tool has prove itself toward positive usability goals measurement and all of the majority user feels satisfied and expresses total enthusiasm during the interaction.

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Currently there are 53 tools given for each specific topic. So here’s a final screenshot:

Speaking of technology, as I was focusing on developing a system with a good user experience, that led me to RIA (Rich Internet Application). For short, this web application was built using Silverlight 3 & .NET RIA Services for front-end + app logic; Castle ActiveRecord as the ORM tool for mapping business objects onto the database, and finally connected through the implementation of WCF (Windows Communication Foundation). So let’s look at the whole architecure below:

Sounds quite complex for such a simple-purpose eLearning application? Well that’s what makes it interesting, because I’ve had so much to learn in the past couple of month! I’ve always been intrigued by the fact that “I’m an Informatics student who spend more time in Photoshop rather than Visual Studio” :p So it’s actually kinda nice to finally built something on your own, from scratch, and gets appraised by many people.

See I was planning on deploying it somewhere, but then i realized that i had to switch my Apache hosting into IIX network. Which, still got me confused on the whole deployment thing :p

Maybe someday i’ll write about it, because sure thing there are several thing to be noticed, such as MIME type setting and how to register GAC so that your Windows environment could detect the services used in HCI Learning Tool (mainly it causes a problem with the Authentication Service).

Thanks again for reading this long-boring-geeky-post. Cheers..