SSD04 Exercise06 个人解答

Take Assessment: Exercise 6

Programming and Heuristic Evaluation

This exercise has two parts:

• A programming part, in which you will create a Visual Basic program that implements a substantial part of the windows Date/Time control panel
• A Heuristic Evaluation part, in which you will use the heuristics you have learned so far to evaluate the windows Display control panel

When you submit the exercise, you should submit all files for both parts. This doesn't mean that you should start both parts at the same time. In fact, it would be to your advantage to start the programming part immediately, and to not start with the Heuristic Evaluation part until you have finished 2.7.2 HE: Help Users Recognize, Diagnose, and Recover from Errors.

Part A: Programming — Full Date/Time Control Panel

Description

This assignment is to create an interface implementing a full Date/Time control panel (patterned after the standard Windows 98 Control Panel).  As shown below, this interface should contain a Tabbed Dialog control with two panes: one for setting the date and time and one for setting the time zone.   The "Date & Time" tab will be new for this assignment and should be like the one shown here—except that you are not required to draw the clock face on the right.  For the "Time Zone" tab, you should use the interface components and code that you created in the previous programming assignment.

Overall, this interface maintains nine pieces of data:

• The second setting (0 to 59)
• The minute setting (0 to 59)
• The hour setting (in 24 hour time, 0 to 23)
• The day of the month
• The month of the year
• The year
• The index of the currently selected time zone
• The offset in minutes from GMT for the currently-selected time zone
• The title of the currently selected time zone

The interface you construct should consist of one Tabbed Dialog container along with "OK", "Cancel", and "Apply" buttons.  The Tabbed Dialog container should have two tabs—the "Date & Time" tab constructed new for this assignment and the "Time Zone" tab taken from the previous assignment.  The "Date & Time" tab should contain two frames (one for the date and one for the time) and a label that displays the currently selected time zone (but not the time zone's offset from GMT).  The "Date" frame should allow the user to specify the month, year, and day.  This should be done using a ComboBox control for the month and TextBox and UpDown controls for the year, and a Calendar control for displaying and changing the day. The Calendar control used here is the "Microsoft Calendar Control 10.0" with the following settings: ShowDateSelectors = "False",  ShowTitle = "False",  ShowHorizontalGrid = "True", ShowVerticalGrid = "True", DayLength = "System (Medium)",  GridCellEffect = "flat", and BackColor set to "white".  In order to use this specific Calendar control, you may need to add it to your toolbox using the Tools -> Customize Toolbox -> COM Components interface.

The "Time" frame of the "Date & Time" tab should consist of a PictureBox control (that will eventually include a drawing of a clock, but may be left blank for now) and a set of controls for the hour, minute, second, and am/pm settings.  Each of the hour, minute, and second interfaces should consist of a TextBox and an NumericUpDown control.  The am/pm interface should consist of a group (control array) of two radio buttons.

The final part of the interface should consist of the "OK", "Cancel", and "Apply" buttons.  When the user presses the "OK" or "Cancel" buttons, you should produce a small report of the current settings (similar to the one shown below) and then exit the interface (by "unloading" the form).  If the user presses the "Apply" button, you should produce a similar report, but not exit the interface.  As in the previous exercise, the report can be created using the MsgBox() subroutine provided by Visual Basic.

Note that some of the data items underlying this interface are presented to the user in different forms than they are stored internally.  For example, the hour of the day is stored internally in 24-hour format (0 to 23 hours) but is displayed to the user in 12-hour format (1 to 12 hours plus am/pm).  Similarly, some items are either displayed or controlled from more than one point.  For example, the current time zone is displayed both in the "Time Zone" tab (not shown here) and as part of the caption for a label in the "Date & Time" tab.  Similarly, the current month setting appears both in a ComboBox, and as part of the calendar control.

Updating these multiple forms of display and synchronizing between values entered in controls and the underlying data values can be greatly simplified by using properly constructed accessor (set /get ) methods for the data values.  As usual, each control should respond to changes in its property values by calling the set method(s) for the corresponding underlying data (possibly after translations such as from 12-hour to 24-hour time).  The set methods can then take responsibility for updating each of the controls that display their values (after checking to ensure that the control needs to be updated).

Resources

• An executable like the application you are asked to create, click Ex6.zip .

When you are done with both parts of this exercise, submit all your files by clicking on "Submit" below.

 

 

Part B: Heuristic Evaluation — The Display Control Panel

Description

This is a picture of the Display Control Panel on Windows machines. Become familiar with this control panel in your computer; experiment with it by clicking here and there. In this exercise, we ask you to evaluate this control panel according to the heuristics you have learned in the second half of this unit. Any aspect of the control panel is fair game for using in this exercise (any dialog box you can get it to bring up, any message it displays, etc.)

Using the five heuristics we have learned in the second half of this unit, do a heuristic evaluation of this control panel. Write up five UARs in the format described in 1.3.3 How to Write a Usability Aspect Report (UAR). At least two of the five UARs should be for usability problems (aspects of the interface that violate one or more of the five heuristics) and at least two should be for good features (aspects of the interface that follow one or more of the five heuristics).

The five heuristics we have learned in the second half of this unit are:

• HE: Error Prevention
• HE: Aesthetics and Minimalist Design
• HE: Recognition Instead of Recall
• HE : Help and Documentation
• HE : Help Users Recognize, Diagnose, and Recover from Errors

Make sure you give us enough context in the UARs to understand what aspect of the interface you are referring to. Including screen shots of the interface really helps us understand your UARs. To capture a screen shot for a UAR, click in the window you want a picture of, then type ALT-PRINTSCREEN. This will put a picture of the window in the copy-buffer. Then paste this picture into your UAR using your word processor.

When you are done with both parts of this exercise, submit all your files by clicking on "Submit" below. 

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Submission

Submit the following files:

• A project archive named Exercise6.zip
• UAR_display_cp.doc