CS 552. User Interface Design

Take-Home Final Exam

Note: Collaboration with other students is not permitted for this exam. Your answers must be uniquely your own. Any questions or requests for clarifications should be sent by email to the instructor.

Return this file, with your answers inserted, through the regular "hand-in" procedure. The deadline is midnight on Friday, June 5.

- Your name here -

1. You have been asked to give a three minute (max!) synopsis to your fellow CS grad students on what user-centered design is all about. What are the four or five main points you will make?

- Your answer here -

2. What is the difference between interpretive evaluation and predictive evaluation? Give an example where each would yield helpful information that the other couldn't reveal.

- Your answer here -

3. Suppose you are developing a survey to acquire information about what requirements novice programmers have for programming environments.

(a) What types of information should you try to gather via this survey, versus interviews or questionnaires?
(b) Give an example of (i) an appropriate question that should be formatted as a Likert scale, and (ii) one that should be formatted as a ranked ordering.

- Your answer here -

4. Give an example of a specific usability issue you would want the answer to if you are involved in formative evaluation of a product. What type of evaluation techniques would be appropriate for providing the answer? How (if at all) would this change if you were involved in summative evaluation of a product instead?

- Your answer here -

5. We've been reading reports from human factors studies and interpreting them in terms of user interface design. Describe two problems arising from the nature of experiments on human subjects that make them difficult to apply directly to interface design.

- Your answer here -

6. Consider the "device models" from the paper by Kieras and Bovair in terms of the structural and functional mental models described in Chapter 6.2. Which was used in the experiments? How does that affect the results that were observed?

- Your answer here -

7. Compare Nielsen's use of the term "heuristic evaluation" with that of Jeffries et al.. How do they differ, and in what sense is each of them "heuristic"?

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8. According to what we have read, which of the two "heuristic evaluation" techniques (from the previous question) is likely to be more cost-effective, and why? Justify your answer with evidence from the collection of papers and chapters we have read.

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