Date: Thursday March 22, 2007
Time: 8:30am-10:30am (Those who can't make it till 9:00am can move to room 207 for an extra 1/2 hour. No one gets more than a full 2 hours, so if you come at 8:45 you only get till 10:45.)
Location: 202 South Hall
Bring: Pens/Pencils (readings and notes are optional)

Coverage

This midterm covers all of the class notes for the first 9 weeks of class as well as all of the assigned readings.

Practice Questions

These questions are meant to be representative of the material that will appear on the exam. They themselves will probably not appear on the exam and the format of exam questions may differ. If you can answer questions like these you should be well-prepared for the exam.

Short-Answer Questions

1. Briefly describe the concepts of affordances and mental models. How do they help explain how people think about their interactions with objects in the world?

2. How can we use Norman's concepts about the gulf of execution and the gulf of evaluation to assess the quality of an interface design?

3. What is an example of a mapping from controls to behavior in an interface to an artifact?

4. What is the main different between user-centered design and standard software engineering practice?

5. What are the main techniques for "getting to know" the users of an interface? (Not including formal user studies.)

6. How does one go about creating scenarios with good coverage of the target users' common tasks?

7. Explain the use of grouping in interface layout.

8. Name a way color can be used in an interface in a useful manner (as opposed to only decorative or aesthetic).

9. Why do we say both  "The user is always right"   and  "The user is not always right"  when discussing design and design guidelines?

10. We can't measure user friendliness. As a result this concept is not all that useful when designing interfaces. Instead we identify specific things about the interface that we can measure that relate to the effectiveness and success of the product. Name at least three specific attributes that have measurable quantities that help determine interface's effectiveness.

11. Name two current common user interface practices for providing error messages or error corrections that really should not be used.

12. Consider the user interface of a standard web browser. Describe the ways it uses consistency in design for helping users following hyperlinks.

13. Why is it a good idea to separate the content of the user interface from the display characteristics? How is this done?

14. Name three advantages of low-fi prototyping over hi-fi prototyping. Name two disadvantages.

15. How are severity ratings computed and used in heuristic evaluation?

16. Describe a situation in which a slower response time than what the system is capable of supplying might be preferable than the faster response time. Explain you answer.

17. Describe the user interface development process, starting at the earliest stages and continuing up to the point when the interface is complete. Name the steps in this process and briefly describe what happens. Briefly discuss the importance of each step, what specific things we must pay the most attention to, and how information relevant to the step is gathered, analyzed, or used. If steps are repeated describe: why, what changes, and when you stop.

    Design Questions

18. Choose one of the other groups' class projects. Read the descriptions of their project goals and the interviews they conducted for their needs assessment. Based on this, draw up a task table that summarizes the tasks they should pursue, with importance priorities.

19. Aging users are a growing proportion of computer users, and some developers of word processors see an opportunity to provide a special version for these users. Critics think that the current Word 7.0 in Windows is adequate for these users and the costs of a special version are not warranted. They have come to you to help design and test a special version for elderly users.
    • List three possible design changes you would make for elderly users and justify them.
    • Choose one of these design changes for empirical evaluation and determine if these changes bring greater benefits for elderly as compared with benefits for other users. Design a formal experiment by doing the following:
      • Specify the independent and dependent variables.
      • State the hypotheses being tested and the results you expect to find.
      • Do the experiment design. This means, for the independent variables (also known as factors), decide on the levels for each factor, decide which aspects will be tested by within-subjects versus between-subjects design, and decide on blocking of iterations of trials.

20. Perform a heuristic evaluation on the web version of the bear-facts system. Focus on the task of updating some personal information, such as a home address.

    First write a paragraph describing what the intended functionality of this interface is (what it is supposed to allow the user to do). Then do a heuristic evaluation of this interface. Follow the steps described in class and in Nielsen Chapter 5. In your writeup, describe at least five usability problems. It is better if you find five distinct violations, rather than several instances of the same guideline being violated.

    Label each violation with an HE rule number using Nielsen's heuiristics. More specifically, for each problem, show the following:

    • Which guideline is violated.
    • Why (briefly -- no more than a few sentences) you think this guideline is violated (you can use screen shots if necessary).
    • A severity rating for the violation.
    • A suggested solution for this problem.

21. SIS Experiment Design Question from class