Human-Computer Interaction

CS 6751 Winter 1999

Midterm review

The midterm will be held during class time, Wednesday, February 3 in Room 102 of the College of Computing.

General format

Topics

In general, the exam will cover material in Norman's book, Chapters 1,3-7 in the textbook. All material covered during lectures is likely exam material, including discussions of supplemental material provided on the website.

For the curious ones, here is the pre-course examination you took at the beginning of the course. It's in Portable Document Format (PDF) which is readable by Acrobat and other word processing programs as well as ghostscript. Hopefully, you will be encouraged by what you now know!

Also, you might want to review the lecture from Wednesday 1st, when we discussed issues with the exam.

Norman

Affordances, visibility, mappings, feedback, constraints
Myth of "human error"
Knowledge in the world vs. knowledge in the head
Mental (user) model, designer model, system image
Why designers may fail in meeting user needs
Designing for error
Myth of "perfect system"
Why do people make errors?
Difference between slips and mistakes
Types of slips
How can we prevent errors
Why are errors hard to detect? (cognitive hyteresis, levels)
Types of forcing functions
Typical computer responses to errors

Chapter 1 - The Human

We discussed how perceptual, cognitive and other characteristics of users inform and constrain hci designs.

Chapter 3 The Interaction

Our discussions of the Norman 7-stages framework and the DFAB User/System model and the 4 translations (articulation, performance, presentation and observation). Also
Gulfs of evaluation and execution
Uses of interaction models

Chapter 4 Paradigms and Principles of Usability

History of interactive technology and respective paradigms.
Principles of usability
Know the difference between the following major categories. as well as be able to define some of the principles included in each category.

Chapter 5 Design Process

The waterfall model, its individual parts, and its shortcomings
Ways to incorporate HCI into the SE process

Chapter 6 User Models

Social models, requirements gathering, stakeholders, participatory design
Cognitive models
Difference between hierarchical, linguistic and cognitive architectures.
Uses of cognitve models
Limitation of cognitive models
Details of GOMS and KLM-GOMS

Chapter 7 Task Models

Uses of task aanalysis
Ways of gathering information
HTA (Decomposition)
types of plans, analyzing HTAs
Knowledge-based
cluster analysis, unique descriptions of objects or actions
Entity-relationship
object-action relationships, roles

Group projects

I expect that you are familiar with the structure of the group projects and the rationale behind the various milestones throughout this quarter.
Whew! That ought to be enough for you to chew on. Best of luck.

Back to CS 6751 Home Page