Design Analysis of Exercise Equipment-Treadmill - Literature review Example

Design Review Student full name Wei Jiang Student ID number U3058979 Name of teacher Scott Tutorial time Wed 12:30-2:30pm Assignment title Name of the technology Design Review Exercise equipment-Treadmill Due date 6 April 2012 You must keep a photocopy or electronic copy of your assignment Student declaration I certify that the attached is my own work. Material drawn from other sources has been acknowledged according to unit-specific requirements for referencing. Signature of student: ___ Wei Jiang_______________________ Date: _ 6 April 2012_______ Analysis With the development and advancement in information technology, human-computer interaction is becoming more and more important and can be found easily around daily life of many people. Treadmills give good aerobic workout among all forms of exercise equipment. They have the capabilities of carrying out this task given that they allow users to simultaneously burn their fat and calories and increase their heart rate. Treadmills are considered the biggest selling exercise equipment for a number of years and carry on outselling other categories. Treadmills are becoming one of the most common and convenient household exercise equipment that users prefer to use. And with the continued improvement of technologies, an increasing number of modern treadmills appear in the market with a lot of new functions which might offer users better exercising experience. The user interface of this equipment combines user and treadmill to convey information to the user through the interface and inputs the information into treadmill. The user interface of treadmill contains several components and the interactions between users and treadmills will be analysed and evaluated with the Eight Golden Rules, one of heuristic evaluation analysis methods. Nielsen (1994) identified that heuristic evaluation is used to figure out usability problems in user interface with identified usability principles. A treadmill provides various different exercises that include jogging, walking, using incline and even running. It is suitable and assists in maintaining good weight of users. Many treadmills can provide programs like hill intervals as well as cardio workouts. The calorie counters on treadmills are usually not accurate. There are several interactions between users and treadmills during the exercising procedures. First of all, it provides essential display functionality to indicate speed, distance, calories burned, heart rate, and any other data to the user. Users can make different orders by pressing corresponding setting buttons. For instance, treadmills allow users to change exercise models and distance, set exercise time and so on. Once the interface receive any data that user accesses, the order will be transferred to treadmill system to be processed. This interaction between users and treadmills contributes to the main application of treadmills and makes most functions easy to use and follow. Secondly, user can control the track speed of treadmills. Up and down buttons are used as setting controllers to ensure users can change and control the speed of track. Users may choose different track speed depending on their specific needs and conditions. Similarly, the gradient of treadmills can be changed depending on personal exercise demands. Thirdly, most treadmills are equipped with emergency stop switches which are regarded as important and necessary settings to enable individual safety of every user. Specifically, the emergency stop switches settings are used to stop the track if user falls down or prevent any accidents that happen during exercising. Users can stop the track whenever they want in very short time by simply pressing the emergency button on treadmills which forms another important interaction. Furthermore, many modern treadmills have the function of heart rate monitor to assess users exercise conditions. According to Fred (2008), who worked in treadmill industry for a period of time, heart rate monitor has two control methods includes handgrip and wireless heart rate controls. To be specific, the application of handgrip heart rate control needs to rely on the transmitter to get result which is not very convenient. Wireless heart rate monitor is comparably more flexible and easy to use. Finally, some treadmills are equipped with cooling fan devices or entertainments which can be used to contribute to better user exercising experience. User can control the working time of cooling fans, to turn on and turn off and change air volume to be appropriate for operators through the user interface. And treadmills user interface was designed comprehensive to meet different demands from customers. User can enjoy the entertainment settings of treadmills, choose music, and change television channels to enrich their simplex exercising procedures. The eight golden rules of interface design proposed by Shneiderman (1998) is one of methods used to guide good interface design and analysis all interactions mentioned above. The first principle of the eight golden rules, strive for consistency means making terminology the same throughout and try to make sequence of the actions be the same in similar situations. In this case, treadmill working system keeps almost ordering actions consistent through the user interface. User can set exercise models, change distance and track speed and so on by simply doing similar actions, press the optional buttons which makes users feel easy to get start and become familiar with treadmill. In addition, treadmills provide simple but clear feedback to the user. According to Johnson (2010), once user completes any changes or settings through the interface, treadmills will display the outcomes immediately and make all feedback clear to be executed. Furthermore, treadmill system is able to prevent users from making serious errors. For example, if users change track speed to the value that machine cannot take over, the interface should detect the error and provide simple solutions for users to reset. Or users use wrong ways to stop the track, treadmills will provide corresponding error handling methods and display the error message. Finally, according to last two principles from the Eight Golden Rules, reduce short-term memory load means people have a limited short-term memory and which requires the user interface to provide concise content and steps for users to follow. And the system of treadmills allows users to customize their personal exercise settings which makes user feel in control. All the interactions based on above analysis work together to bring about all the performances of treadmills. Users will have the capability of being in control of changing exercising settings which could be regarded as the main interactions between users and treadmills since it covers most essential required functionalities for the exercise equipment. Users can interact with treadmills by simply pressing different buttons that are easy to operate. At the same time, treadmills achieve to provide users high-quality services by providing a good user interface. And the interactions between users and treadmills will be improved to be more technical and automatic with the development and advancement in technology. The extent and quality of the recommended changes on treadmill will specifically focus on improving interactions of the user and enhancing user interfaces of the treadmill to provide good performance of treadmills. Zap (2009) posits that the performance of the treadmill can be improved by including motion tracking interfaces and multi-screen interfaces on the user interface of treadmill equipment. These additional interfaces will assist in monitoring the body motions of exercising users and then translating that motion into commands that can be easily understood and interpreted by heuristic evaluation analysis method. The importance of Multi-screen interfaces is that it employs use of multiple displays to give an extra flexible interaction between exercising users and the treadmill equipment. Motion tracking interface can make treadmill to be held by users even when they are in motion thus improving users’ interaction. The only weakness of this recommendation is that it will require complex modification to be carried out on current treadmills that are in use. In addition, user interaction can be improved by making use of touch user interface or touch screen. Touch pads can be used as both an input and an output device. Touch screens can enable users that want to exercise to input control parameters like distance to be covered by just by touch of fingers. On the other hand, the treadmill equipment can display functionality to indicate speed, distance, calories burned, heart rate and any other information to the user. Hence, such use of mobile devices on treadmill will make it appear as a self-service machine to the users and make exercising users to feel a sense of being in control. The strengths of including touch user interface on treadmill is that it can replace or supplement other means of output that have haptic methods of feedbacks that are already integrated in treadmills. Touch user interface have computerized simulators that can enable users to customize their individual exercise settings and effectively control the treadmill machine. Another way of improving user interaction is through optimizing the Eight Golden Rules of heuristic evaluation analysis methods into modules by using a decision tree to evaluate those rules. The strength of optimizing eight golden rules will ensure consistency among actions throughout the execution process improving efficiency of executing user requests to be processed in similar manner. According to last two principles from optimization of the Eight Golden Rules will reduce temporary memory load making users who are exercising to get quick response from the user interface of treadmill equipment that would provide concise content to the user since it only has few steps to follow during execution time. Interaction of treadmill can also be improved by modifying the operational emergency stop switches into conversational interface agents. This will enable personification of the treadmill interface to be in a form of an animated robot, person or other characters that the user is familiar with. Use of conversational interface agents on treadmill will allow exercising users to interact with the equipment in a more conversational way thus eliminating errors associated with user confusion between switches on treadmill machine. Another recommendation is to replace modern treadmills the two controls of heart rate monitor with hover controls. The heart rate monitor with two control methods, wireless heart rate controls and handgrip controls can be replaced by extra utility controls like delete and edit controls. These hover controls do not have to be automatically shown adjacent to every item they represent at all times. They can typically be hidden to simplify the user interface of the treadmill and make exercising users to focus their whole attention on the main content of controls. As a way of example, such hover controls can be used treadmill equipment to show messages when a users set distance to be covered is unrealistic. Moreover, treadmills can be equipped with cooling fan devices that have smaller vanes. Smaller vanes rotates at a very high speed, and this can make the fan to generate more wind with just few rotations which can then be used to contribute to better user exercising experience. Use of a variety of control switches on the fan can make users to control the working speed of cooling fans, to turn on and turn off, increase or reduce speed so as to change volume of air to an appropriate level for users through the user interface of the treadmills. Such a system of treadmills will enable users that are exercising to customize their individual exercise settings making them to feel in control. In some cases, the treadmill can have interface for controlling entertainment when they are exercising. The entertainment interface could have well illustrated guidelines with more examples to enable users to select preferred music to listen to when they are exercising. Those examples should be differentiated from other computer output like prompt, error messages and menu output (Rogers, 2011). The last recommendation is to use Up and down buttons that have different colors for clear contrasting. Different colors for different buttons can make users to interact with treadmills by merely pressing specific buttons that are easy to operate. The strength of using contrast on user interface of treadmill can assist in managing and maintaining focus of exercising users. Correspondingly, the focus of users can be managed by attracting their attention by use of contrast among buttons. There can be a headline post example of a user who is exercising with some information underneath the headline indicating the date and time when the user started exercising. Shneiderman (2008) states that the two posts can have contrasting color shades to improve the readability of the interface of the treadmill. All the headline text can be set in black and the color of underneath information decreased to clearly contrast the underneath information regarding the users’ name and date. Similarly, the background color can be contrasted by putting its text in a light gray shade. The contrast can be brought forward by efficiently shifting the user focus by letting the underneath information of the user popping out, while the headline information fading away. Including this technique on user interface of the treadmill can enable a lot of information to be scanned easily while showing other additional information like dates of the user. Fading away the extra information enables exercising users to focus easily their individual attention to most essential pieces of information. Conclusion In conclusion, the assignment mainly focuses on three parts. The introduction about treadmill, the analysis of the design user interface and interactions with the Eight Golden Rules analysis method, and finally described the evaluation of the interactions. It is evident that good system user interfaces and interactions are required to provide well performance of treadmills. Modern technologies promote people to have more interactions with technical but daily essentials and make life more convenient. References Fred, W. (2008). ‘Heart rate control for Treadmill Workouts’, About.com, December 11, viewed on 3rd April 2012, http://walking.about.com/od/treadmilling/a/treadmillhrc.htm. Johnson, J. (2010). Designing with the Mind in Mind: Simple Guide to … San Fransisco: Morgan Kaufmann Nielsen, J, ‘Ten Usability Heuristic’, useit.com, viewed on 28 March 2012, http://www.useit.com/papers/heuristic/heuristic_list.html. Rogers, Y. (2011). Interaction Design: Beyond Human – Computer. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Shneiderman, B & Plaisant, C 2010, Designing the User Interface-Strategies for effective Human- Computer Interaction, 5th edn, Addison-Wesley. Shneiderman, B. (2008). Designing the User Interface. New York: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company. Zap, B. (2009). FlipKlip Treadmill Book Holder 1-Pak. Boston: Levenger Press. Read More

Secondly, user can control the track speed of treadmills. Up and down buttons are used as setting controllers to ensure users can change and control the speed of track. Users may choose different track speed depending on their specific needs and conditions. Similarly, the gradient of treadmills can be changed depending on personal exercise demands. Thirdly, most treadmills are equipped with emergency stop switches which are regarded as important and necessary settings to enable individual safety of every user.

Specifically, the emergency stop switches settings are used to stop the track if user falls down or prevent any accidents that happen during exercising. Users can stop the track whenever they want in very short time by simply pressing the emergency button on treadmills which forms another important interaction. Furthermore, many modern treadmills have the function of heart rate monitor to assess users exercise conditions. According to Fred (2008), who worked in treadmill industry for a period of time, heart rate monitor has two control methods includes handgrip and wireless heart rate controls.

To be specific, the application of handgrip heart rate control needs to rely on the transmitter to get result which is not very convenient. Wireless heart rate monitor is comparably more flexible and easy to use. Finally, some treadmills are equipped with cooling fan devices or entertainments which can be used to contribute to better user exercising experience. User can control the working time of cooling fans, to turn on and turn off and change air volume to be appropriate for operators through the user interface.

And treadmills user interface was designed comprehensive to meet different demands from customers. User can enjoy the entertainment settings of treadmills, choose music, and change television channels to enrich their simplex exercising procedures. The eight golden rules of interface design proposed by Shneiderman (1998) is one of methods used to guide good interface design and analysis all interactions mentioned above. The first principle of the eight golden rules, strive for consistency means making terminology the same throughout and try to make sequence of the actions be the same in similar situations.

In this case, treadmill working system keeps almost ordering actions consistent through the user interface. User can set exercise models, change distance and track speed and so on by simply doing similar actions, press the optional buttons which makes users feel easy to get start and become familiar with treadmill. In addition, treadmills provide simple but clear feedback to the user. According to Johnson (2010), once user completes any changes or settings through the interface, treadmills will display the outcomes immediately and make all feedback clear to be executed.

Furthermore, treadmill system is able to prevent users from making serious errors. For example, if users change track speed to the value that machine cannot take over, the interface should detect the error and provide simple solutions for users to reset. Or users use wrong ways to stop the track, treadmills will provide corresponding error handling methods and display the error message. Finally, according to last two principles from the Eight Golden Rules, reduce short-term memory load means people have a limited short-term memory and which requires the user interface to provide concise content and steps for users to follow.

And the system of treadmills allows users to customize their personal exercise settings which makes user feel in control. All the interactions based on above analysis work together to bring about all the performances of treadmills. Users will have the capability of being in control of changing exercising settings which could be regarded as the main interactions between users and treadmills since it covers most essential required functionalities for the exercise equipment. Users can interact with treadmills by simply pressing different buttons that are easy to operate.

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