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 evaluation
Types of 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
Player 9 and Adobe Flex 2.0
• How to observe users in natural settings.
 Executes up to 10 times faster than the legacy ActionScript
• Unexpected findings resulting from in the wild studies. code on the new highly optimized ActionScript Virtual
Machine(AVM2)
• Having to develop different data collection and analysis  Provide a true object oriented model for
techniques to evaluate user experience goals such as programmers
challenge and engagement.  Enables creation of applications with large data sets and
object oriented reusable code
• The ability to run experiments on the Internet that are quick
and inexpensive using crowdsourcing. Features of ActionScript 3.0
• How to recruit a large number of participants using  Core Language Features
Mechanical Turk.Test text  API Features
The language of evaluation
Core Language Features - Defines the fundamentals of the
 Analytics programming language such as data types, expressions, loops, etc.
 Analytical evaluation ActionScript 3.0 provides:
 Biases
 Controlled experiment  Run-time exceptions (reports more error conditions)
 Crowdsourcing  Run-time types (provides perform run-time type checking)
 Ecological validity  ECMAScript for XML (E4X) (AS3 implements E4X)
 Expert review or crit Field study  Sealed classes (includes the concept of sealed classes)
 Formative evaluation  Method closures (to remember object instance, useful in
 Heuristic evaluation event handling)
 Informed consent form
Flash API Features - new APIs that give the user a better control
 In the wild evaluation over objects at a lower level
 Living laboratory
 Predictive evaluation  DOM3 event model (provides a standard way of generating
 Reliability and handling events)
 Scope  Display list API (provides a set of classes for working with
 Summative evaluation the visual primitives in Flash)
 Usability laboratory  Working with text (provides a flash.text package for all text-
 User studies related APIs)
 Usability testing Basic Programming Concepts
 Users or participants
 Validity ActionScript, like other programming languages provides basic
features to users, such as:
Participants’ rights and getting their consent
 Variables
• Participants need to be told why the evaluation is being  Constants
done, what they will be asked to do and their rights.  Data Types
• Informed consent forms provide this information.  Operators
 Conditional Statements
Things to consider when interpreting data  Looping Statements
• Reliability: does the method produce the same results on
separate occasions? Variables and constants
  A variable represents a piece of DATA to be used in the  ActionScript classes have three types of characteristics
program o Properties
o Methods
o Events

 Events

- Mechanisms that determine which statements need to

 A constant represents a piece of DATA that can be executed and when
assigned a value only once during the course of program
- Events are things that occur and need to be responded to
execution
- For example, a mouse clicks by user or a key typed in by
user

- Following shows the ActionScript code to handle an event

Data Types
Class Object

 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