Bruce Tognazzini – He tells that iterative design, with its repeating • Validity: does the method measure what

measure what it is intended to

cycle of design and testing, is the only validated methodology in measure?
existence that will consistently produce successful results.
• Ecological validity: does the environment of the
Types of evaluation evaluation distort the results?

• Controlled settings involving users, eg usability testing & • Biases: Are there biases that distort the results?
experiments in laboratories and living labs.
• Scope: How generalizable are the results?
• Natural settings involving users, eg field studies and in
the wild studies to see how the product is used in the real ActionScript
world.  A programming language, developed by Macromedia
• Settings not involving users, e.g. to predict, analyze & Inc. (taken over by Adobe Systems)
model aspects of the interface analytics.  Used for websites and applications based on Adobe Flash
Player and Adobe AIR run-time environments
Evaluation case studies  Compliant to ECMAScript, syntactically similar to
JavaScript (European Computer Manufacturers
• Experiment
Association)
• field study  Executes in the ActionScript Virtual Machine
(AVM)
• Crowdsourcing
ActionScript 3.0
What did we learn from the case studies?
 Introduced in 2006 with release of Adobe Flash
• How to observe users in natural settings. Player 9 and Adobe Flex 2.0
• Unexpected findings resulting from in the wild studies.  Executes up to 10 times faster than the legacy ActionScript
code on the new highly optimized ActionScript Virtual
• Having to develop different data collection and analysis Machine(AVM2)
techniques to evaluate user experience goals such as  Provide a true object oriented model for
challenge and engagement. programmers
 Enables creation of applications with large data sets and
• The ability to run experiments on the Internet that are quick
object oriented reusable code
and inexpensive using crowdsourcing.
Features of ActionScript 3.0
• How to recruit a large number of participants using
Mechanical Turk.Test text  Core Language Features
The language of evaluation  API Features

 Analytics Core Language Features - Defines the fundamentals of the

 Analytical evaluation programming language such as data types, expressions, loops, etc.
 Biases ActionScript 3.0 provides:
 Controlled experiment
 Crowdsourcing  Run-time exceptions (reports more error conditions)
 Ecological validity  Run-time types (provides perform run-time type checking)
 Expert review or crit Field study  ECMAScript for XML (E4X) (AS3 implements E4X)
 Formative evaluation  Sealed classes (includes the concept of sealed classes)
 Heuristic evaluation  Method closures (to remember object instance, useful in
 Informed consent form event handling)
 In the wild evaluation
Flash API Features - new APIs that give the user a better control
 Living laboratory over objects at a lower level
 Predictive evaluation
 Reliability  DOM3 event model (provides a standard way of
 Scope generating and handling events)
 Summative evaluation  Display list API (provides a set of classes for working with
 Usability laboratory the visual primitives in Flash)
 User studies  Working with text (provides a flash.text package for all
 Usability testing text-related APIs)
 Users or participants Basic Programming Concepts
 Validity
ActionScript, like other programming languages provides basic
Participants’ rights and getting their consent features to users, such as:
• Participants need to be told why the evaluation is being  Variables
done, what they will be asked to do and their rights.
 Constants
• Informed consent forms provide this information.  Data Types
 Operators
Things to consider when interpreting data  Conditional Statements
• Reliability: does the method produce the same results on  Looping Statements
separate occasions?
Variables and constants  ActionScript classes have three types of characteristics
o Properties
 A variable represents a piece of DATA to be used in the
o Methods
program
o Events

 Events

- Mechanisms that determine which statements need to

executed and when

- Events are things that occur and need to be responded to

 A constant represents a piece of DATA that can be
assigned a value only once during the course of program - For example, a mouse clicks by user or a key typed in by
execution user

- Following shows the ActionScript code to handle an event

Class Object
Data Types  For every class, ActionScript creates a special class
object that allows sharing of both behavior and state
 Though it may not have practical implications for many
applications
 The block diagram below represents the structure of a
class object, of a class A

Operators - Special functions that use one or more operands and

return a specific value Flash Professional CS5 provides two tools for writing ActionScript
code:

- Action Window: Allows to write ActionScript code

attached to frames on a timeline

- Script window: Dedicated text editor for working with

ActionScript (.as) code files

OOP Concepts

 ActionScript 3.0 has more functionality, compared to the

previous versions, to support the OOP concepts such as:

 Inheritance („final‟ and „override‟ keywords added)

Conditional and Looping Statements  Encapsulation („protected‟ and internal‟ keywords added)
 Polymorphism
 Interfaces („IEventDispatcher‟ interface added)
 Design Patterns („Factory‟, „MVC‟ and other patterns
included)

Object Oriented Programming in ActionScript

 OOP is basically a way to organize our code with the help

of objects

Classes

 The heart of all object-oriented code development

 An abstract representation of object