Date: Thursday March 18, 1999
Time: 11:00am-12:30pm
Location: 202 South Hall
Bring: Pens/Pencils, readings and notes are optional

This midterm covers all of the class notes for the first 8 weeks of class as well as the following readings:

Dix et al. Introduction, Chapter 1, Chapter 3, Section 4.3, Chapter 5, Sections 6.5-5.10, Chapter 7, Sections 10.1-10.4, Sections 11.1-11.4
Nielsen Chapter 5
Olsen Chapter 2
Holtzblatt and Beyer paper
Ims paper
Rettig paper
Cooper paper
Sullivan paper
Gomoll paper

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.

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 three 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 concept of chunking. How is this related to gestalt principles?

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

9. Why might it be useful to know about pre-attentive processing features of the visual system when designing user interfaces?

10. Say you want to make a chart showing population of the U.S. by state. Why is it a mistake to do this by showing a map of the country and filling in the outline of each state according to a color which indicates the population range? Why is it a mistake to do this using grey scale?

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

12. 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.

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

14. Consider the user interface of a standard web browser. Describe the kinds of lexical, syntactic, and semantic consistency it provides for users following hyperlinks.

15. What is a UI Prototyping system? What is a UI Toolkit? Compare and contrast the two. What are the benefits of these approaches for developing user interface software?

16. Why is it a good idea to separate the programming of the user interface from the rest of an application program?

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

18. What are the two main differences between heuristic evaluation and other discount usability engineering methods and formal user studies? What are the main tradeoffs between the two?

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

20. 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.

21. 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.

22. 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

23. Why is an event-driven control flow (instead of sequential control flow) needed for graphical user interfaces?

24. 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.