Logistics
Date: Tuesday March 12, 2002
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.
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.
- 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.
- For a given design, identify problems with it and sketch a
redesign that addresses these problems.