after attending the first lesson of cs3382

I have neither expected how the course was like nor fully understanding the words "Usability" until yesterday night. Before the formal lesson starts, our professor, Andy Chun, conducted a questionaire asking about what sort of learning outcome we expected to gain after completion of the course. I simply wrote stuffs like creative design(e.g. layout of the web, position of object placement...), multi-media knowledge(protocol, platform, web2.0, handling of sound, graphics, video stuff), usability principle, loading speed,etc. But afterall, I still had a vague concept of what is "Usability" in mind. Now, the concept is getting concrete. Most importantly, "Usability" focuses on the user's point of view. The way we put ourselves into the client's need and design an appropriate software/website to suit their needs is the course emphasis. That is why we are encouraged to make user profile in the coming lecture. We are also increasing our capability to increase user's satisfactory by means of carrying out User-centered design process( like card sorting, choosing focus group) through a series of learning. Another interesting point the tutor had raised yesterday is something that I miss normally - the Search Engine Optimization(SEO). I have never thought of the idea to improve a website's popularity by encoding the web to be a validate web site before doing publishing since it is troublesome and as a waste of time. However, the time sacrificed in early publishing will be offset by the SEO. All in all, I think I really hope that all kinds of these principle will be practised in the near future.