Artistically Representing Terps (ART)
Watson Chao watson@wam.umd.edu
Shirin Parsee s_parsee@hotmail.com
Date Completed: April 29, 2002
Table of Contents
Report on the Development Process
ABSTRACT
The system we developed, called Artistically Representing Terps (ART), allows students to submit their personal artwork to be displayed in the Computer Science Instructional Center. It will allow other students to actively decide what will be shown in the halls and help make the atmosphere more comforting and less boring and depressing. Each month, students will be able to vote for their favorite artwork and the top 10 will be posted and placed into the archives for the next month. We hope that ART will give students a sense of Terp pride and hopefully lead them to be more active on campus.
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Watson and Shirin designed the high fidelity prototype of ART in Visual Basic 6.0. Shirin conducted 2 usability tests and Watson conducted 3. Each helped equally on all other aspects of the project.
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INTRODUCTION
Overview
Many students at the University of Maryland have many artistic capabilities that go disregarded on a normal basis. Yet, these students can help make the campus livelier and more interesting by displaying their artwork to the campus. We hope to develop a system, called Artistically Representing Terps (ART), which will allow students to submit their personal artwork and display them in the Computer Science Instructional Center. Each month, students will be able to vote for their favorite artwork and the top 3 will win prizes and placed into the archives. This will give those students a sense of pride and hopefully lead them to be more active on campus. It will allow other students to actively decide what will be shown in the halls and help make the atmosphere more comforting and less boring and depressing.
Previous WorkCommercial Systems
Ebay
http://listings.ebay.com/aw/plistings/list/category20125/index.html
This site is a nice venue for artists to sell their work. However, the artists cannot receive criticism nor is any information about the artist revealed. We wish to make our system more personal and less about just selling art.
Looking For Art
http://www.lookingforart.co.uk/
This site provides users with free web space to display their work and hopefully have potential buyers seek out their work. We hope to provide the same basic idea of free display of art for students and any visitors.
Previous Academic Papers
BT Design Art Gallery
http://digilander.iol.it/barbaratampieri/voting.html
They introduce a voting system that describes all of the criteria needed for a winning entry. However, it is too in depth for our system and would take much longer for the average user to vote.
Call for Art
http://tap3x.net/EMBTI/artcall.html
This is an interesting page about how people’s personalities can be reflected through their art work. Perhaps in a future edition of the ART system, we can have an electronic psychologist that analyzes the University of Maryland students through their designs.
Relevant Web Sites
Croydon College Art, Voting & eGreetings
This site is the basic idea of what we want to accomplish. However, our program will include more advanced features such as allowing the users to draw out their design on the actual site. Our site will be different from their site in that ours will have a rating system for each design rather than picking one design out of all submissions.
Inter-Art Museum
http://www.inter-art-museum.gr.jp/top.html
This site is a nice representation of all artwork that people can submit. However, there is no voting system in the site and it primarily deals with younger children’s artwork. We hope to gain a wider audience to submit designs and to give well-informed critiques.
Universal Archives
http://www.universal-archives.com/index.html
This site, although not
aesthetically pleasing, is a good representation of what we wish to
achieve. It displays all of the
artists’ names and displays their artwork under their names.
PRESENTATION OF DESIGN
Overview of Approach
and Solution
Our initial approach was to allow people to submit their artwork on the ART gallery and also make their own designs on the system. However, after discussing things over, we decided to omit the page where people could design the artwork on the system because most people in the Computer Science Instructional Center would not have time to design the artwork right then and there. Also, since we wanted real artwork, it would probably take more than just a few minutes to design. We also suggested using an ID recognition system for students and faculty so that only they could be able to vote and represent the campus. Since the ID recognition would be done electronically, we decided for purposes of this project to design a Login page where each person has to first login to get access to voting and submitting artwork. Thus, visitors may only view the ART gallery
Transition Diagram
Vote Help (11)
High Fidelity
Prototype
Figure1. Artistically Representing Terps Home
This is the initial screen (1) and from this, the user may go to
(2), (3), (4), (5), (6), (7)
Figure 2. Gallery
From this screen, the user may
go to (10), (1)
Figure 3. Top 10
From
this screen, the user may go to (1)
Figure 6. Submit
From
this screen, the user may go to (1) or (8)
Figure 7. LogIn
From
this screen, the user may go to (1)
Figure 8. Successfully Submitted
From
this screen, the user may go to (1)
Figure 9. Vote
From
this screen, the user may go to (2)
Tutorial/Help
ART (1). The initial start-up screen is the ART (1) page. It leads the user to the Gallery (2), the Top 10 (3), the Make a Design (4), the Archives (5) and the LogIn page (6).
Gallery (2). This page illustrates all of the submissions for artwork. At most, there will be 6 pieces of art on the page at a time. If there are more, then the Next button is enabled. If the current page on the Gallery has previous submissions, then the Previous button is enabled. The user can click on any of the pictures on the Gallery to proceed to vote. They can return home to ART by clicking on Close.
Top 10 (3). This page illustrates the top 10 art works that have been rated and illustrates them in order of highest number of votes from left to right, top to down. If less than 10 artworks have been submitted, then all of the artworks will be posted in order of highest number of votes. The user may return home to ART by clicking on Close.
Make a Design (4). This portion was not
implemented.
Archives (5). This stores the previous
months’ Top 10 artworks. You can return to ART by clicking on Back.
Submit Entry (6). This page is used for submitting the artwork. It shows the current directory’s list of folders. A folder must be selected to proceed. Once the folder is selected, then all of the files in that folder are shown. The only files shown are the ones that have a “.jpg” extension. The file must be selected to be submitted and only one file may be submitted at a time to allow the user to enter the appropriate title and artist information for each piece of art. The Title of Work holds the title of the art, the Artist’s Name holds the artist’s first and last name, and the Comments holds the background information on why the artist made that art, and what it represents to them. If none of the fields are entered in, then they will be stored in as “N/A.” To submit the file, Submit must be clicked. If no files are desired to be submitted, then Cancel may be clicked to return home to ART.
LogIn (7). This page ensures that only students and faculty may vote. Once filling in the User Name and Password, it will try to log in the person. Any password will work except for a blank one (this is done to illustrate that only students and faculty may sign in and since the actual system will have ID recognition, this is just a visual example). If the user chooses to Log In as a Visitor, then submitting and voting privileges will be denied.
Vote (8). Once clicking on a picture in the Gallery, this screen pops up with the picture that was clicked on to be voted. It posts the artist’s information and allows the person to vote on the artwork from a scale of 1-5. In the top right corner, it holds a tally of how many votes the artwork has had thus far. Once the user determines how they wish to vote for it, they can proceed by clicking on Vote and returning back to the Gallery.
REPORT ON DEVELOPMENT PROCESS
Process for Arriving
at the High Fidelity Prototype
We tried to get our low-fidelity prototype to visually determine how to pursue the high-fidelity prototype. After a few different prototypes on paper and then Visual Basic, we were able to determine the most suitable structure to implement the high-fidelity prototype.
We developed our ART system in Visual Basic. We started with the main page and branched off to the various links. One of our first issues was to determine how a person would submit an artwork. We decided that they would first have to save it on a drive in the Computer Science Instructional Center and then browse through the folders and files to submit that file. We determined that the only people that would be able to vote are students and faculty because we wanted to represent the Terrapins. Therefore, a person had to first login to vote, and if they logged in as a visitor, submitting and voting privileges were denied from them.
The Gallery shows only 6 pieces of artwork at anytime, instead of the 2 that was previously suggested in our low-fidelity prototype. This number was determined to be the most suitable because it would allow the users to see the pictures relatively well and would allow the user to see 3 on each row. We decided to not have 10 on each page because a user may get confused with the Top 10 page.
Consistency was aimed for in this project. We tried to label the terminology with effective names and keep them consistent throughout each page. Help messages show exactly how to perform any given task on each page. Finally, help messages have been made in uniform format each showing a number of steps that is expected to facilitate the user to understand what to do in what order upon pressing the help button. The help button has the same appearance and location in every screen, however, provides information relevant to the current screen the user is in.
Task List
- Log in.
- Create a design and submit it for viewing and rating.
- Search the gallery for your design.
- View comments on your design.
- Rate your design.
- Browse the gallery.
- Vote on 5 other designs.
- Check out the Top 10 designs to see if your design is already there.
- Search the archive for previous artwork/winners.
Usability Test
The 5 following subjects were separately given the usability test. Some of the tasks (such as making a design) were not available to be done during the usability test. Also, some of the subjects had to be constantly reminded to be vocal while testing our system, and some were more than willing to offer suggestions and improvements.
Subject 1:
The user is a sophomore computer science student. He is comfortable with using computers and voting systems. He uses a computer everyday and is aware of imperfections in the program. This user generally uses his computer about 35 hours a week. He normally doesn’t have much time to just vote on art, but still wanted to try out ART. The subject was given the task list and he performed well on most of the ones that he was able to do, since some of the system was not implemented.
He criticized the appearance of the site, and joked that it wasn’t eye catching enough for him to, on a normal basis, bother to try it out (see Fig. 10). This was previously brought to our attention. However, we had decided to stay away from too many graphics to prevent cluttering the site and taking away from the main focus. Nonetheless, since this system is for interactive purposes and its main intent is to bring forth more unity for the students, then the appearance was reconsidered. However, we decided to stay with our original design.
Fig. 10 ART
Subject 2:
The user is a sociology student who is also an artist. She has seen other universities’ sytems that allow the students to submit personal art work and would love to see it happen for University of MD. This user has some experiences with computers, mostly for chatting and word processing and approximately uses it for 14 hours a week. She was excited to test out our program, and she was more than vocal about the problems that she experienced and wanted to see improvements on.
She noted that the pictures that were clicked on in the gallery would get distorted (stretched) in the new page that would show up (see Fig.11). She emphasized that doing so, may not have the same effect as the art work in a normal view would look like. Therefore, judging the art work may become unfair. We noted that as a major problem and rated that as a 4 for importance because we don’t want potential artists that want to submit their work see that happen to their artwork and scare them away. We also want to make sure that the users get the best view of all the images so that they get the feeling that the artist was trying to evoke.
Fig.11 Vote: Distorted image when voting
Subject 3:
This user is a high school sophomore
who is beginning to take some computer science classes. Being an avid chatter
and internet surfer, he felt comfortable with computers and mouse manipulation.
He uses the computer about 20 hours a week.
The user kept clicking on the ‘x’ button on top of the forms instead of hitting on the button that would exit him from the form. When asked why he was doing that, he said that he didn’t even realize that there were any exit buttons available. He got confused because some of the buttons say “Close” (such as when the Top10 is queried –see Fig.12), some say “Home” (such as the form that shows up when the button “Gallery” is clicked on –see Fig.13), and some, such as the submitting form, don’t even have a close or cancel button to allow the user to exit the form (see Fig.14). Therefore, he naturally clicked on the ‘x’ buttons for all the forms to get back to the original page. This problem isn’t considered a major issue because it doesn’t affect the system. However, it may be a bit confusing. Therefore we’ll try to make sure we are using the first Golden Rule of interface design and strive for consistency with terminology.
Fig.12 Top 10
Fig. 13 Gallery
Fig. 14 Submit
Subject 4:
This user is a physics major who is
minoring in Art, so she was extremely interested in our electronic art program.
Her experiences with computers aren’t too high, since she mostly uses it for
word processing and mathematica (used for her major). She uses the computer
approximately 10 hours a week, but borders 15 when there is a big mathematica
project due. She isn’t too vocal about the problems she had, so we had to
remind her constantly about voicing her opinions.
This user got annoyed when she tried to submit art work. After submitting the first picture, she had to go and erase the previous submission’s title, artist name and caption (see Fig. 14). She would have been more comfortable if after every submission, the form would be blank. As a team, we didn’t even realize this problem because we were allowing the default (N/A) to replace the fields to prevent us from re-typing every art work’s information. This can waste a user’s time and become a little annoying and it took little effort to correct the problem.
Subject 5:
This user is Watson’s mother. She doesn’t have much experience with computers, which was our goal in determining if novice users would be able to use the system effectively. Anytime she does use the computer, it’s to play electronic mah-jong. She generally uses the computer for about 2 hours a week.
The first button she tried to click was the help button, but since we haven’t yet put up a help page, she didn’t receive any assistance with using the system. One of the main problems was that she wasn’t vocal about any issues that arose because she didn’t want the group to feel that they were faulty in the design. After much persuasion, she finally told us that since she wasn’t used to operating computers and using login names/passwords, she didn’t really understand the concept of what ART is. We didn’t find this to be a very productive session, since most users who will be using this program in the CSI lobby will have computer experience.
Conclusions
Implementation
The Artistically Representing Terps (ART) allows users to submit their artwork into the Gallery for viewing and voting by students and faculty. This will allow the campus community to give feedback to artists and also relax them and open their eyes to the creativity that is prevalent throughout the campus. We implemented a Login form, a Submit form for the artwork, the Gallery which allows people to click on the pictures to vote, a Top 10 page, and Archives of previous work.
Future Possibilities
We did not actually design the feature in the system that would allow individuals to make designs to submit. This was due to lack of time and constraints in Visual Basic. We would like to see this possibly go Online to provide access to students and faculty outside of the CSI lobby. Also, there should be a system of checking for pornography, violence and other questionable artwork in respect to other people. The system may also provide sub-categories for art such as poetry, sculptures, and painting. Also, some other possibilities include printing greeting cards using the art work and selling the artwork online.
Recommendations to future
developers
Our intentions were to bring forth more campus involvement and unity, therefore we suggest that this system maintains the initial intent of keeping voting and submitting privileges primarily for students and faculty. We strongly advise to get more artists into the usability test because they are the key in the design process and functionality of the system. Also, a survey should be performed to determine what other features should be included and are greatly desired by the students.
We would like to thank Dr. Ben Shneiderman for guiding us
through our project and offering his greatly appreciated advice. We would also like to thank our family,
friends and classmates for helping us with the usability tests and offering
suggestions for improvements.
Tampieri, Barbara. BT Design Art Gallery. http://digilander.iol.it/barbaratampieri/voting.html 2002
Call for Art. http://tap3x.net/EMBTI/artcall.html
Croydon College. Art, Voting & eGreetings. http://www.croydon.ac.uk/art/ 2002
Sakuragaokacho, Shibuya-ku. Inter-Art Museum.http://www.inter-art-museum.gr.jp/top.html1998
Looking For Art. http://www.lookingforart.co.uk/ 2002
Universal Archives International Art Galleries. Universal Archives. http://www.universal-archives.com/index.html 2002
eBay Inc. eBay Art. http://listings.ebay.com/aw/plistings/list/category20125/index.html 2002