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IDAT306/7 Final Year Project

Dissertation topic of study:

Throughout the year my dissertation topic has developed and changed a lot. I started by simply looking at the practice of user experience design and studying what different aspects affect user experience on a website. As a designer I was naturally more interested in the visual side of user experience design and decided to look at how visual elements affect user experience in more detail. I began to explore the practice of visual design and look into what visual design encompasses. From this I decided to focus on one visual aspect of design; colour.

I began to explore the different ways in which colour can be used and found that there are many different uses:

- It can be used to visually balance a design

- It can be used to make elements appear more dominant that others

- It can be used to convey a strong sense of identity

- It can be used to evoke emotions from users.

I found myself more interested in the human side of Human-Computer Interaction and decided to focus more on user emotions responses. I began looking into more detail how colour can impact on user emotions. I explore how individual colours evoke different emotion and how the inclusion of colour in its entirety affects users emotions. My findings suggested that colour is hugely important in design and can be used to instill specific emotions within users that affect their subsequent navigation and perception of a website.

The major conclusions that I drew were that colour has the ability to affect user experience through its ability to invoke emotions and that it has a practical value should ux designers wish to use it as a catalyst in design.

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Tweaking the project

After seeing how the visualisation worked and the patterns it created, there was one change that I wanted to make. I decided, mainly for practical reasons, that I would insert a bit of code that reset the count at the end of each day. The main reason for this is because as the visualisation built up over a few days the website started to have loading problems. This is definitely an area that could be improved upon. However I did like the idea that each day there would be a fresh visualisation that represented how the site was being used on that particular day.

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Reviewing my Project

I think that my project, although not the most technically complicated, has a really novel and interesting concept behind it. The website presents users with the opportunity to directly change the look and feel of the website. As well as this it provides each user a unique visualisation of the traffic data and they can see how they have impacted on the website. I find the concept of having a website that dynamically changes and adapts according to how it is used really interesting. I think that my project represents this concept, albeit in a simple way. I also think that the simplicity of the project is one of its strengths. Using circles to represent users helps to present the concept in a clear and concise way.

The aims I set for myself in the project proposal were to make a website that:

- Analyses and visualises itself in Real Time

- Transforms through how it is being used

- Gives each user a unique experience

- Visualises data in a different way

I think that to an extent I have realised all of these aims:

- The website pulls in data and visualises that data in real time to the user.

- It transforms according to the real time data that it records.

- The visualisation is never identical and is constantly changing and therefore gives each user a unique experience.

- The website uses the simplicity of circles to present the web traffic data in a unique way.

Overall I am pleased with the outcome of my project. However, if given more time, there is potential to expand and improve the project.

Improvements and Limitations

This project for me was a massive challenge as I had never used PHP before, which was what the entire website was based upon. This obviously restricted me in terms of what I could produce and there is definitely room for improvement. Initially I set out to visualise lots of different types of web data, perhaps this was a little too ambitious. In the end, due to time constraints and my own coding skills, my project focused on one specific web data aspect; visits.

In terms of development, I would aim for the website to visualise more web data aspects other than just visits. I would also aim for these other aspects to affect the website in different ways which would create for a more dynamic website. It is definitely an area that I will look further into.

Another technical problem... As mentioned in a previous post, after the website's visualisation had built up over a few days there started to be problems with the loading of the circle images. To correct this I simply changed the visualisation to be based on a daily time frame, so that each day was represented individually. If I had more time, I would've explored how I could develop a more effective system.

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IDAT301 Real-Time

No I need to implement similar code into other divs so that it affects them in different ways. So I decided to make visits also affect the size of the logo and all the other text content. This was fairly straight forward as it just meant that I had to implement similar code for the other divs. I created a couple more of variables and inserted them into the if statements:

$logo = 18; $fontsize = 8; $titlesize = 12; $height = 250; $width = 250; if ( $count > 5 ) { $height = 270; $width = 270; $fontsize = 8; $titlesize = 12; $logo = 18; }

I then added the variables into the css styles of the divs. This all worked well so I decided that I would begin to compile all the elements onto the homepage of the site. After a couple of hours I managed to tweak everything so that it was all working effectively.

I then began to promote the site on Facebook and Twitter in order to get visitors and to see how visualisation was effected. I collected screenshots throughout a few days and documented the transformation to the website - see photos in above posts.

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Sticking to the Plan

I began to think more about the concept and aim of the module: ‘Transformation and Manifestation’ and how I had originally aimed to address these concepts. In my proposal I had stated that my aim was to create a website that transformed in real-time depending on how it was being used. To an extent I had began to realise that aim. The next step for me was to clarify exactly what I wanted the end product to be. So I began to think about the theory behind my project.

I thought about what I had discussed in Hannah in previous meetings. We had talked about the idea of having a website that changed depending on whether it was beingused, rather thanhow it was being used.For example, if it was being used regularly it would grow and change, and in contrast if it was being neglected it would shrink and deteriorate. I found this concept really interesting and decided that this is the theory that I would focus on. I started to think about how I could practically apply this theory with the PHP skills I had learnt in the past few weeks.

I decided that the visit counter would be the primary source of data as this is the best way to see how much the site is being used. I thought about how I could use this data to affect different elements of the website. I decided that experimenting with having the visit count affect the fontsize of the main content would be a good starting point.

Firstly, to do this I created a variable called '$fontsize' and simply made that equal to the visit count like so:

$fontsize = $count;

echo $fontsize;

This code works but the font size increases dramatically after just a few visits. So I decided to create an if statement that told the fontsize to increase if the visit count was above a specific number:

if ( $count > 5 ) { $fontsize = 10; }

I then wrote more if statements that went up in increments of 5 and increased the fontsize accordingly.

if ( $count > 10 ) { $fontsize = 10.5; }

and so on...

This created a really simple but good effect. The more the site was visited the bigger the text became, which in turn made it easier to read. This meant that the usability of the site itself was being affected by the amount of people that were visiting it. I found this concept interesting and wanted to keep this theme running through the rest of the project.

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