If you got the equivalent of an A- or better, you cannot get credit for doing this assignment (although you are welcome to do it if you like!). If you qualify to get points for doing the make-up assignment, the maximum score you will be able to boost your grade to is the equivalent of an A-. I am doing it this way in order to be fair to those people who did well on the midterm.

Since I am making this make-up assignment available, I will use the standard grading scale for the midterm:

97-100 A+; 93-96 A; 90-92 A-
87-89 B+; 83-86 B; 80-82 B-
77-79 C+; 73-76 C; 70-72 C-

I've decided to take questions from the practice midterm and assign them. Each question is worth 3 points; you have to do a good job of answering the question to earn the points. If you only do a subset of the questions, you have to do the first ones in the subset. In other words, if you only want to do three questions, you must do questions 1-3, and so on. Turn them in on paper in class on April 30th.

Make-up 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. Name three ways color can be used in an interface in a useful manner (as opposed to only decorative or aesthetic).
3. 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.
   • Describe 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.
4. Name two current common user interface practices for providing error messages or error corrections that really should not be used.
5. Why is it a good idea to separate the content of a web-based user interface from the display characteristics? How can this be done?
6. 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.