(Spring 2008 - Agrawala & Canny): "Q1: Ubicomp In Weiser's article he presents the idea of 3 scales of devices (inch-scale, foot-scale and yard-scale). Describe each scale and name as many unique affordances as you can at each scale. Describe a new application that is uniquely suited to each scale but not the other two. Q2: Design principles for input devices. Describe the design space for input devices from the paper on "Design Morphology" by Card et al. How does this paper do enumeration of complex input devices from basic components? What are effectiveness and expressiveness? What are desirable features generally for input devices? Q3: Scientific Method What are independent, dependent, control and random variables? Give an example of each. What is a confounding variable? What are between subjects and within-subjects experiments? Explain the pros and cons of each Suppose you have developed a new multitouch interface for browsing a collection of images. You want to rigorously compare your interface to a mouse-based interface using the scientific method (i.e. hypothesis testing). State a testable hypothesis and explain what the independent and dependent variables of your experiment will be. Then state the corresponding null hypothesis. Q4: Budget ethnography Describe what budget ethnography is, and how it is executed? What were some high-level differences between the approach of this paper to observation and contextual inquiry, which is one of the methods used by this paper?"
(Spring 2007 - Agrawala & Canny): "Q1: Paper Prototyping What is paper prototyping and how is it used? What are the advantages and disadvantages of it? What is Landay and Myers' SILK system? What are its advantages and disadvantages? Q2: The psychopathology of everyday things What are "natural signals"? What are affordances? Where do they come from, i.e. why should people share such understandings? What is a conceptual model? Give an example. What is the role of "mappings" in HCI design? What is the "designers dilemma" discussed in Norman's chapter? Q3: Fitts' Law What is Fitts' Law? What are the assumptions Fitts' Law is based on? Why is there a log term in it (i.e. derive Fitts' Law). How would you extend Fitts' law to 2D? Q4: Tangible User Interfaces. Describe the three main classes of TUIs as per Ishi's paper. Give an example of each type. For each example, say what the advantages of a tangible interface are for that problem. Finally, what general metaphor did Ishi propose for tangible UIs?"
(Spring 2004 - Canny & Mankoff): 1) UI design principles question: (Gould and Lewis reading, Beyer and Holtzblatt) What were the main princples for User-centered design laid out by G&L? Explain these. How did the G&L approach to the user differ from the contextual inquiry approach? 2) GOMS question: Define GOMS, apply KLM to a clicking task (simple yes/no dialog box). Explain actual timings using Human Info Processor. Explain why it only applies to experts. Think about whether GOMS applies to a person with motor impairments. 3) PROTOTYPING QUESTION: Why is paper appropriate for prototyping? What do people prototype with paper? What are its advantages and disadvantages? Why did Landay and Myers propose a digital system (SILK)? What are its advantages and disadvantages? 4) ARKOLA Question: What was the motivation for the ARKOLA experiment? What were the benefits of using sound? What were problems with the way sounds were designed? How were the sounds designed? Discuss relationship with testing of noticeability.
(Fall 2003 - Canny & Mankoff): "1) Heuristic Evaluation 2) Mobile Device 3) Information Visualization 4) Mixed-Initiative"
(Spring 2003 - Canny & Mankoff): 1) a) Sketch the human-centered design cycle used for user interface design. b) Give some principles for building effective early (low-fidelity) prototypes. c) Explain scenarios and their role in design. d) (building on c) Explain one or more view(s) of an interface prototype that a designer would want. 2) a) Name one mostly qualitative evaluation technique and one mostly quantitative or empirical evaluation technique. b) Name three key factors that you would use to decide which technique to apply when designing an interface c) Suppose you did a study using the empirical technique and found that your interface successfully allowed a user to complete three tasks that you had chosen to test. On what grounds, specific to the technique you chose, might you refute such an evaluation? 3) a) Define Context and Context Awareness. b) Define primary and secondary context (as per Abowd and Dey). c) Give a taxonomy of types of context. 4) Two approaches to ubiquitous computing are to place the infrastructure in the environment or to place the infrastructure on the body. This applies to decisions on where sensing occurs, where information is stored and where information is processed. a) Select one concrete example application from the literature. Was a body or environmental approach used? Is this justifiable for technological reasons, human reasons, both, or neither in your opinion? b) From a technical perspective, discuss the advantages and disadvantages of environmental versus body approach on the basis of sensing, storage and computation. c) From a human perspective, discuss the advantages and disadvantages of environmental versus body approach on the basis of sensing, storage and computation.
(Fall 2002 - Landay & Mankoff): 1) Give an overview of GOMS a) What does GOMS stand for and describe each piece? b) What are the advantages & disadvantages? c) Give an overview of how one runs a GOMS analysis d) How might we take advantage of GOMS for automated usability testing? 2) Card, Mackinlay and Robertson present a model of input devices in their 1992 paper. a) What are its limitations b) What other issues and innovations in input should be considered in a comprehensive description of input? -disability -ambiguity -two handed input -input transformations (e.g. soft keyboards) -intelligence, prediction, etc. 3) MVC architecture a) What does MVC stand for and describe each piece? (draw a diagram) b) What are the advantages of MVC? c) How is MVC often employed in practice? (hint: Which components are grouped & why) 4) Grudin describes challenges for groupwear developers, and Abowd and Mynatt describe some of the issues in evaluating ubicomp systems. a) From an evaluation perspective, are there any common problems among any of these domains? b) Is "scientific" evaluation possible in these domains? What role does empirical evaluation and quantitative data have to play in designing and evaluating these systems?(Spring 2002 - Canny & Landay): 1) Conceptual Models a) What is a conceptual model? b) How is it communicated or learned? c) What happens when the user's conceptual model differs from the designer's intended conceptual model? d) Should the conceptual model match the model of the underlying system? Why or why not? 2) Mark Weiser's papers articulated a vision of ubiquitous computing and calm technology. a) List some parts of this vision which have been realized (or are happening now), and some which have not. b) For the examples that have not been realized, explain why you think they havent. 3) Agents vs. Direct Manipulation a) What is the debate between direct manipulation and agents? b) Is there a middle ground between these two positions? 4) Heuristic Evaluation a) Briefly describe the steps in conducting a Heuristic Evaluation b) How does the typical number of usability violations found depend on the number of testers? How should you choose the best number of testers? c) What problems are there with averaging severity ratings, and how can you deal with them?
(Fall 2001 - Canny & Landay): "Q1: Contextual Inquiry (CI) a) Describe how to carry out a Contextual Inquiry. b) What is the metaphor used for the interaction with the participants? Why is this metaphor good? c) Why is CI better than interviewing or observing alone? What do you do with the data? What type of organizational techniques are used? d) What do you do with the resulting data and what are some techniques used to organize it? e) In what type of development situations is it hard to apply CI? Q2: Design a) What is an affordance? Give an example of an affordance in a real world, physical object and in a user interface. b) What is a conceptual model? What happens if the user's conceptual model does not match the designers conceptual model? c) What does mapping mean in terms of UI design? What kind of mappings make Uis easier to use and understand? Q3: Visualization a) Describe focus+context visualization b) What are the advantages of focus+context? c) What are the disadvantages of focus+context? Q4: Speech Can you directly translate a GUI into a SUI (Speech UI)? Is it reasonable to? If not, what are the problems? Contrast the "shapes" of typical GUI and SUI command hierarchies."
(Fall 2000 - Canny & Landay): "Question 1: Usability Evaluation a) What are the tradeoffs between Heuristic Evaluation and traditional user testing? b) Remote usability-evaluation is a hot area in HCI. This method places the participant in the evaluator in different locations and possibly working at different times (usually each is in their regular workplace). Why would usability professionals be interested in it? d) What are some of the drawbacks to remote usability evaluation? e) Log file analysis is one way of doing remote usability evaluation for web sites. What are the advantages and disadvantages of this approach? f) Which current usability techniques would be easier to deploy in a remote way? Which might be harder to deploy? Why? g) How might remote testing augment traditional usability evaluation? Question 2: Education. a) Describe the "Kidsim" paper and its main results. Relate these to the ideas on pedagogy from the Papert readings. In particular: b) Why did they take the approach that they did? What where the justifications for PBD and simulation? c) How did they do it? What were the implementation decisions? d) What did they discover when they tried it? e) Finally critique the approach in the paper and suggest improvements. Question 3: Model-based UIs UIDE represented a new way to implement a UIMS. a) Describe the model based approached. b) What are its advantages? c) The model based approached has not caught on in industry (i.e., in commercial tools). Why might that be so and how might we go about improving this situation? Question 4: Group Communication. Imagine you are managing an interdisciplinary group with members split among two distant locations. Referring to the Dourish and Bellotti paper, and to Elena Rocco's paper, describe how you would manage communication between the two geographic subgroups."
(Spring 2000 - Canny & Landay): "Q1: Interactors - Define Interactors. What are some of the typical behaviors? Drawbacks? Discuss the separation between graphic feedback and underlying control, and the correspondence between the interactor and the controller in MVC. Q2: Interaction Modes - Contrast speech and graphical UIs. Compare tangible interfaces and GUIs. List some physical limitations of TUIs. Q3: Model-Human Processor - Describe the MHP. Describe the relevance to current UIs in terms of GOMS evaulations and in design. Q4: Collaboration - Summarize Elena Rocco's results and their use of dilemma games. Discuss Dourish's paper. Contrast their study with other shorter term studies of video conferencing."
August 2000