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Individual Report Project Four Student Name:Joshua Bayley Assessment Item No.: 3 Assessment Title:
Report of reflections on the development of the calculator program against GUI design principles.

SID:5052369

Evidence (e.g. screen shots) to be provided and reflected as follows: Your individual GUI design Consideration of heuristics for your GUI design Reflection on the links between elements of your GUI design and the usability issues they address Note: your report should be in 500-750 words and supported with appropriate references using Coventry University Harvard Reference Style.

This is my individual design of the GUI for the programmers calculator for project 4. The main design is very basic, the background is a light colour so it is not too distracting, and the buttons are different shades of grey to be basic. The reason they are different colours is to show that they all have different functionalities. The buttons themselves are grouped closer to buttons with similar functionalities, making it a lot easier to define what does what and differentiate the number pad to the memory functions for example. The radio buttons on the right are grouped as well. I used radio buttons for decimal, binary, hexadecimal as this will clearly show what mode the calculator is in, so if a user is unsure, they can look to see which button is active. The font is as large as possible as to make it as easy to read as possible, with the output in the text box the largest to make it clear. I took into account Schneidermans 8 Golden rules for the design of the GUI. I made sure I was consistent. All the buttons are the same size and all have the same easy to read font. Apart from the C and CE I made all of the fonts black. C and CE I made different to make them stand out due to their functionalities and changed the colour of the font to white as to make it easy to read. The symbols are universal, so that a user will know what each button does presuming they know that the symbol actually means. The one that is a bit out of the

@Coventry University

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Version 1 ordinary is x^y due to the fact I could not get x to the power y symbol, so I chose to do what is commonly known as x to the power y when it is not handwritten. I have also allowed a use of a shortcut, that instead of always having to press the buttons, this is designed to be able to use the keyboard in the text box as well, so a user can type the numbers and basic arithmetic symbols if they wish. This is so they are not forced to just use the mouse to press buttons if they find it a tedious task. It offers clear feedback through the text box. It is designed to give an immediate response to the inputs that the user makes. It will display the answer in that box and will display what you have typed so far so the user can see if they have made any mistakes, so it is less likely to get an outcome that was not expected. This also yields closure due to the fact it will show each step taken, ensuring the user that the process is going as expected or if it doesnt, making it easier to return using the back key, which is just like the arrow on the keyboard that defines the backspace. This, alongside the C and CE buttons, make it easy to reverse actions, for example the wrong button was pressed and they needed to go back, or to start over, these buttons make it easy to do so. Lastly, this does minimise the short term memory load as much as possible. The display is very simple and grouped up like mentioned, and the radio buttons are as few as possible. This gives the user less things to have to remember while using this calculator. While my individual design is usable to make the programmers calculator, the group decided to go with a different design, a more simple text based design with a small amount of buttons.

@Coventry University

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