Logistics
Date: Tuesday March 6, 2001
Time: 12:30pm-2:00pm
Location: 202 South Hall
Bring: Pens/Pencils (readings and notes are optional)
Coverage
This midterm covers all of the class notes for the first 7 weeks of
class as well as all of the assigned readings.
Nielsen, chapters 1-5, 7
Bloopers (Johnson), chapters 1-6
From the reader:
Norman, chapter 1-2
Raskin, chapters 2-3
Cooper, chapters 9-11 (from Inmates)
Gomoll, Ims, Cooper (end of errors)
Rettig, Cooper (perils of prototyping), UIE, Klee
Newman & Landay, Spool (talk), Hearst, Duyne et al
From the web:
Practice Questions
These questions are meant to be representative of the material that
will appear on the exam. They themselves will 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.
-
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?
- 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?
- What is an example of a mapping from controls to behavior in an
interface to an artifact?
- What is the main different between user-centered design and
standard software engineering practice?
- What are the main techniques for "getting to know" the
users of an interface? (Not including formal user studies.)
- How does one go about creating scenarios with good
coverage of the target users' common tasks?
- Explain the use of grouping in interface layout.
- Name a way color can be used in an interface in a useful manner
(as opposed to only decorative or aesthetic).
- Why do we say both "The user is always right" and
"The user is not always right" when discussing design
and design guidelines?
- 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.
- Name two current common user interface practices for providing
error messages or error corrections that really should not be used.
- Consider the user interface of a standard web browser. Describe
the ways it uses consistency in design for helping
users following hyperlinks.
- Why is it a good idea to separate the content of the user interface
from the display characteristics? How is this done?
- Name three advantages of low-fi prototyping over hi-fi prototyping.
Name two disadvantages.
- How are severity ratings computed and used in heuristic
evaluation?
- 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.
- 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.
- Describe one good feature and one bad feature of each of these interaction
styles:
- command language
- form based
- question and answer
- menu based
- natural language (English)
- direct manipulation
- virtual reality
- 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. Describe in detail an experiment you would conduct if
you had substantial resources and sufficient time. Describe the hypothesis,
independent and dependent variables, and the results you expect to find.