DTUI Booksite Exam Questions [Chapter Introductions | Lecture Notes | Web Resources ]

Chapter 1:

1. We can't measure user friendliness. As a result this concept is not too 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. There are at least five specific attributes that describe an interface's effectiveness. Name three of these measurable quantities we can use to determine success. (Sears)

 
2. 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. (Shneiderman)
• Give 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, indpendent and dependent variabls, how to select and assign subjects, number of submjects, training, main and interaction effects, and statistics you would use. Draw graphs or bar charts of the result you expect.
3. How does the knowledge of users' abilities affect interface design? (Liffick)

 
4. How does the design of a life-critical system differ from that of other systems? (Liffick)

 
5. Compare and contrast motivating factors between life-critical systems and those for home, office, or entertainment. (Liffick)

 
6. What are some design concerns pertaining to cultural and international diversity? (Liffick)

 
7. Describe the five human factors that should be taken into account during user interface design. (Liffick)

 
8. Briefly identify some areas of human diversity that challenge the developers of interactive systems. (Liffick)

 
9. What are the four primary sources of motivation for human factors in design? Give an example of each. (Liffick)

 

Chapter 2:

1. Describe the Syntactic/Semantic Model of Objects and Actions (SSOA) and draw the picture of the knowledge domains users must have in order to use a computer system. (Shneiderman)

 
2. Describe the Foley and van Dam cognitive model. (Liffick)

 
3. Discuss devices (techniques) for getting the user's attention. How and why are they implemented? (Liffick)

 
4. Give an example and discuss the implementation of one of Shneiderman's Golden Rules of Interface Design. (Liffick)

 
5. List and explain Norman's four principles of good design. (Liffick)

 
6. Define "gulf of execution" and "gulf of evaluation." (Liffick)

 
7. Describe five measurable human factors. (Liffick)

 
8. Discuss the following statement: "There are some tasks machines are generally better at performing than humans. The best way to design human-machine systems is to simply allocate the necessary functions based on what each is generally better at." (Chapman)

Chapter 3:

1. What are the main needs that need to be addressed in interface guidelines? (Liffick)

 
2. What are some of the arguments usually given for and against participatory design. (Chapman)

 
3. What is a User Interface Management System? What is a Toolkit? Compare and contrast the two. What are the benefits of these approaches for developing user interface software? (Jacob)

 

Chapter 4:

1. How should demographics be distributed in a usability study? (Liffick)

 
2. What is the "discount usability engineering method?" (Liffick)

 
3. List and explain the different types of expert reviews. (Liffick)

 
4. List and explain the steps of usablity testing. What are some of the limitations of such testing? (Liffick)

 
5. What are some of the formal specification methods for describing a design? (Liffick)

 
6. What five methods might be used as part of an expert review? Describe each method briefly. (Liffick)

 
7. Early in the design process, the user-interface architect should generate a set of working guidelines for the project. What are some of the factors that a guidelines document should address? (Liffick)

 
8. Compare and contrast expert reviews with usability testing. (Chapman)

 

Chapter 5:

1. Why are transition diagrams useful? What problems can occur when they are used? (Chapman)

 
2. Pick two different user-interface-building tools, then compare and contrast them. (Chapman)

 

Chapter 6:

1. Give four benefits and four problems of direct manipulation. (Shneiderman)

 

Chapter 7:

1. As screens grow larger, some designers are tempted to increase the number of menu items displayed at once. For example, with 50 states in the US, give three strategies for organizing the layout and justify them briefly based on user tasks and knowledge. (Shneiderman)

 
2. Should menus be narrow & deep or broad & shallow (in general)? Why? (Sears)

 

Chapter 8:

1. Task-domain actions and objects should be more memorable than syntactic details for specifying them. If the typed UNIX commands such as "cp", "rm", and "ls" were replaced by "copy-file", "remove-file", and "list-directory", give (Shneiderman)
• three positive effects you would expect.
• two negative effects you would expect.
2. Write a state transition diagram specification of the syntax for a simple command in a user interface. Pick any command you like, and first describe it briefly in English, then write it as a state diagram. Finally, define each of the tokens, actions, and other outputs you used in your diagram (with a short phrase in English). (Jacob)

 

Chapter 9:

1. Give three benefits and three problems of touch screens. (Shneiderman)

 
2. Give three benefits and three problems of voice recognition input. (Shneiderman)

 
3. Explain the concept of chunking. (Liffick)

 

Chapter 10:

1. Describe a situation in which slower response time might be appropriate. Explain you answer. (Shneiderman)

 
2. Human memory plays an important role in how well people deal with an interface. Describe two important differences between STM (Short-Term Memory) and LTM (Long-Term Memory). (Sears)

 
3. About how long (give a range) can you expect a user to wait when providing each of the following types of feedback? (Sears)
• No feedback at all
• Spinning wheel or Hourglass
• Progress bar (% done)

Chapter 11:

1. Proponents of agent-like interfaces suggest that an anthropomorphic and adaptice interface might be more effective than a direct manipulation design with neither of these. (Shneiderman)
• Describe an application where an agent might be applied and describe how an anthropomorphic representation and some aspect of adaptation might be useful.
• Describe an empirical study that would examine these two independent variables for their individual and combined impact on two dependent variabls. Describe the hypotheses, independent and dependent variabls, how to select and assign subjects, number of subjects, training, main and interaction effects, and statistics you would use. Draw graphs or bar charts of the result you expect.
2. Write three guidelines for the design of effective error messages. (Shneiderman)

 
3. Describe a situation in which denser, more compact displays (i.e. more information and less white space) might be appropriate. Explain you answer. (Shneiderman)

 
4. When shown in isolation, roughly how many colors can people distinguish? (Sears)

 

Chapter 12:

1. Compare and contrast online help with offline help. (Chapman)

 

Chapter 13:

1. Compare a hierarchical browser and a nested-indented scrolling-list browser for a directory structure that has four levels and ten branches at each level (10,000 items). In each case the window size is ten items long. Write an argument in favor of the hierarchical browser and try to estimate the amount of time for typical tasks. (Shneiderman)

 

Chapter 14:

1. Describe the time-space matrix traditionally used to decompose cooperative systems. Include an example for each "cell" in your answer. (Chapman)

 

Chapter 15:

1. Describe the four-phase framework to clarify user interfaces for textual search. (Chapman)

 

Chapter 16:

1. Discuss the characteristics of good web page design. (Liffick)

 
2. Propose and discuss some ways the web may be made more accessible to the handicapped, either through browser design or web page design. (Liffick)

 
3. What are three major problems with hypermedia? (Liffick)

 
4. Some of the favorite techniques of web pages these days include automatic scrolling text boxes, moving marquees, and constantly running animations (e.g. for icons). Discuss these features in terms of web design guidelines. (Liffick)

 

Afterword:

1. List four Plagues of the Information Age from the ten presented by Shneiderman, then describe a fifth of your own that is not in the list of ten. (Chapman)

 

Unclassified:

1. There are a number of concepts that people use to help them understand the world, including Affordances and Mental Models. Briefly describe these concepts and how people use them to explain the world. (Sears)

 
2. Describe the differences between the following ideas, including advantages and disadvantages for each. (Sears)
• Global vs. Local prototyping
• Throw-away vs. Evolutionary prototyping
3. The user/task analysis is aimed at identifying important characteristics of the users, their tasks, and their work environment (in addition to determining who does what, how often). (Sears)
• List two user characteristics that may be important. Explain how each characteristic may impact the design of an interface.
• List two task characteristics that may be important. Explain how each characteristic may impact the design of an interface.
4. 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. (Sears)

 
5. Pick a common, specific aspect of two operating systems (MacOS, Windows, UNIX) and compare and contrast their functionality. Note which aspect you prefer and why. (Liffick)

 
6. Give one good feature and one bad feature of each of these interaction styles: (Jacob)
• command language
• form based
• question and answer
• menu based
• natural language (English)
• direct manipulation
• virtual reality
7. Why is it a good idea to separate the programming of the user interface from the rest of a program (this is called dialogue independence)? (Jacob)

 
8. What is "dialogue independence" and what are its benefits? (Jacob)

 
9. Write a state transition diagram specification of the syntax for a slider used for entering a numeric value. Describe your slider briefly in English first, then write it as a state diagram. Finally, define each of the tokens, actions, and other outputs you used in your diagram (with a short phrase in English). (Jacob)

 
10. Lisa Neal has used DTUI in her distance learning classes. Her class web site is inside a firewall, so she can't give access to it, but she has indicated that she is willing to be a resource for anyone teaching a distance learning HCI class - with tests, individual and team exercises, etc. Her email address is: lisa@acm.org. She also has a public web page at: http://www.acm.org/top/people/neal.html

Please send comments and suggestions to the Booksite Director Last Updated: 11 December 2002