March 03, 08 by cjgibbs
So in my last post I touched a little on usability and I’ve been thinking about that word a lot lately. Like how on earth are we going to create an interface to myACU that is both extremely functional and usable. And by usable I mean easy enough for Joe Shmoe freshman to figure out. For those of you who don’t know what myACU is, well it’s ACU’s student, faculty, and staff portal. From myACU users can access the standard stuff like email, calendars, documents, files, and ACU account information as well as get the latest news and participate in the ACU community. So the big question is, how do we pack all that stuff (and more!) into the iPhone?
In order to answer that question I think we need to back up and ask the following:
- Exactly what content do we want in a mobile version of myACU and how should that content be organized?
- How do we integrate that content with future applications in the learning and social environment?
- How will the content adapt based on the user? (ex. professor vs. student)
Once we have some answers to these questions the design and interface options available to us will become a lot clearer. So one day soon (hopefully) we’ll actually have some things to show off!
* Just for clarification, the acu.mobi website is more a proof of concept and a place for links to our development applications. I for one hope that the final mobile version of myACU is a lot more functional and feature-rich!
February 26, 08 by cjgibbs
If you haven’t heard, ACU just announced that all incoming freshmen will receive an iPhone or iPod Touch - the details aren’t hammered out yet - Engadget has even picked it up. There has been a huge movement at ACU pushing this for quite a while and has been fueled even more by a student/faculty/staff created video called Connected. So being the first school in the nation to do this it’s pretty big, which really puts the pressure on us to deliver the applications necessary to utilize these devices in a learning environment.
For the past couple months we’ve been ramping up iPhone development; you can see most of what has already been developed at acu.mobi (best viewed in Safari as it’s designed for the iPhone). NOTE: This is still considered a development site and not production ready. There is a protected section (requires and ACU login id) which allows us to display data customized for the user viewing the site and a demo of what you might see if you were logged in.
A lot of the content on acu.mobi is just links to external apps (like Google Docs, Facebook, etc.) that are customized for the iPhone but there are a few that we’ve developed specifically for the university environment. For example, I created an application that allows professors to take attendance in class from their iPhone. You can see it in the demo section of acu.mobi under My Classes (professor) -> Roster. It allows the professor to easily select which students are Present, Tardy, Absent, or Excused as well as automatically send an email to those students notifying them of their status. When I was a student I would have loved this because often I was marked absent when I really wasn’t and so had no way of knowing I needed to ask the professor about it.
There are a number of challenges when it comes to creating applications for the iPhone. I won’t go into all of them but the biggest is usability. Some people say content is king, well I say usability is king. This is true with any program or website but especially true on the iPhone, where you have a very limited interface. Thanks to all the classes on usability and design standards with Dr. Susan Lewis in the JMC department that I thought I’d never need, I’m able to (hopefully) design with usability in mind.
Well this is just the beginning so I’ll try to keep updating this as iPhone development starts to become more and more a top priority. Hopefully we’ll make some pretty cool apps, both general purpose and for higher education.
