Web usabilityWeb usability of a website are broad goals of usability, presentation of information, choices made in a clear and concise way, a lack of ambiguity and the placement of important items in appropriate areas as well as ensuring that the content works on various devices and browsers. Web usability includes a small learning curve, easy content exploration, findability, task efficiency, user satisfaction, and automation. These new components of usability are due to the evolution of the Web and personal devices.
Outlook.comOutlook.com, formerly named Hotmail, is a free webmail service that is part of the Microsoft 365 product family. It offers mail, calendaring, contacts, and tasks services. Founded in 1996 by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith as Hotmail, it was acquired by Microsoft in 1997 for an estimated $400 million and relaunched as MSN Hotmail, later rebranded to Windows Live Hotmail as part of the Windows Live suite of products. Microsoft phased out Hotmail in October 2011, relaunching the service as Outlook.com in 2012.
Downloadable contentDownloadable content (DLC) is additional content created for an already released video game, distributed through the Internet by the game's publisher. It can either be added for no extra cost or it can be a form of video game monetization, enabling the publisher to gain additional revenue from a title after it has been purchased, often using some type of microtransaction system. DLC can range from cosmetic content, such as skins, to new in-game content such as characters, levels, modes, and larger expansions that may contain a mix of such content as a continuation of the base game.
The SimsThe Sims is a series of life simulation video games developed by Maxis and published by Electronic Arts. The franchise has sold nearly 200 million copies worldwide, and it is one of the best-selling video game series of all time. The games in the Sims series are largely sandbox games, in that they lack any defined goals (except for some later expansion packs and console versions which introduced this gameplay style). The player creates virtual people called "Sims", places them in houses, and helps direct their moods and satisfy their desires.
Usability engineeringUsability Engineering is a professional discipline that focuses on improving the usability of interactive systems. It draws on theories from computer science and psychology to define problems that occur during the use of such a system. Usability Engineering involves the testing of designs at various stages of the development process, with users or with usability experts. The history of usability engineering in this context dates back to the 1980s.
Microsoft Flight SimulatorMicrosoft Flight Simulator is a series of flight simulator programs for MS-DOS, Classic Mac OS and Microsoft Windows operating systems. It was an early product in the Microsoft application portfolio and differed significantly from Microsoft's other software, which was largely business-oriented. As of November 2022, Microsoft Flight Simulator is the longest-running software product line for Microsoft, predating Windows by three years. Microsoft Flight Simulator is one of the longest-running PC video game series of all time.
Iterative designIterative design is a design methodology based on a cyclic process of prototyping, testing, analyzing, and refining a product or process. Based on the results of testing the most recent iteration of a design, changes and refinements are made. This process is intended to ultimately improve the quality and functionality of a design. In iterative design, interaction with the designed system is used as a form of research for informing and evolving a project, as successive versions, or iterations of a design are implemented.
Iterative and incremental developmentIterative and incremental development is any combination of both iterative design or iterative method and incremental build model for development. Usage of the term began in software development, with a long-standing combination of the two terms iterative and incremental having been widely suggested for large development efforts. For example, the 1985 DOD-STD-2167 mentions (in section 4.1.2): "During software development, more than one iteration of the software development cycle may be in progress at the same time.
Iterator patternIn object-oriented programming, the iterator pattern is a design pattern in which an iterator is used to traverse a container and access the container's elements. The iterator pattern decouples algorithms from containers; in some cases, algorithms are necessarily container-specific and thus cannot be decoupled. For example, the hypothetical algorithm SearchForElement can be implemented generally using a specified type of iterator rather than implementing it as a container-specific algorithm.
Observer patternIn software design and engineering, the observer pattern is a software design pattern in which an object, named the subject, maintains a list of its dependents, called observers, and notifies them automatically of any state changes, usually by calling one of their methods. It is often used for implementing distributed event-handling systems in event-driven software. In such systems, the subject is usually named a "stream of events" or "stream source of events" while the observers are called "sinks of events.
