HCI Area Qualifier: April 13, 2001

Format for Qualifier: Each student is to answer 5 questions in total. At least three of those questions must come from the Part 1 and one question must come from Part 2. The remaining question can come from either section.

PART 1

    Quantitative and Qualitative Modeling and Evaluation

    1. Would Don Norman, as characterized by the The Design of Everyday Things, more likely agree with the Model-Human Processor model of cognition, or the Distributed Cognition model? Why?

    2. Compare and contrast a Model-Human Processor driven versus a Distributed Cognition driven approach to the evaluation of the space of emerging information appliances.

  2. Some people argue that if the intent of your research is to create innovative visions of future interactions, then user testing is a waste of time. The argument is that if you invent anything really innovative, users won't know what to make of it.

    1. What support from the literature in HCI research and your own research experience can you use to support this opinion?

    2. What arguments (again from the literature or your own research experience) can you present that would still support the need for user testing in the face of innovation?

    User Interface Software and Technology

  3. There are many WYSIWYG graphical user interface construction tools like Visual Basic, Delphi, or a current Java IDE like Jbuilder. Consider the task of constructing an interface to a relatively complex application, such as a chip design tool. What do these tools do best to support the development of this kind of application, that is, how do they help the most in the interface creation process? Conversely, what do these tools do worst, that is, what are they least helpful with?

  4. Suppose that someone wants to adapt an existing 2D UI toolkit for use on a PDA in order to help people develop new applications for the handheld machine. Would changes to the toolkit be necessary and if so, what changes? What would be the challenging problems in this process?

    5. Design

  5. A common design approach in industry today is to combine agent/wizard interfaces with more traditional direct manipulation interfaces. By inspecting the underlying metaphors for these two interface concepts, what are the issues in integrating these interface designs? How should users conceptualize these interface concepts with respect to each other?

  6. You are interested in designing technology that supports the serendipitous use of context-dependent information. For example, a publisher's representative frequently visits faculty at different schools and wants to be able to pitch the right books to a given individual based on a number of factors specific to that faculty member's current interests and teaching responsibilities. Describe techniques, and difficulties, for gathering field data on how people do that now in their everyday life. How can this information better inform your design goals for automating the serendipitous use of context by the publisher's representative in the above scenario?

PART 2

    CSCW

  1. Suppose that a new video conferencing technology has been invented of near-perfect quality, called p-video. In experiments in controlled situations with large screens, subjects could not reliably guess whether they were talking to the actual person or to a p-video of the person. A version of almost equal quality will work in a small window on your desktop computer, and is as easy to use as the telephone. What implications does the invention of p-video have for the future of CSCW? What problems for CSCW does it solve? What problems does it NOT solve? Are the implications different for different kinds of groups? Discuss, citing relevant studies from the literature.

    2. Information Visualization

  2. Assess, in detail, the relative strengths and weaknesses of zooming UI/visualization paradigms as embodied by systems such as Pad++ and Jazz.

    3. Ubiquitous Computing

  3. In automated capture and access applications, one popular objective is to provide seamless capture, that is, a capture system that minimally intrudes upon the normal activities of the captured experience.

    1. Explain how this objective was or was not achieved with the Classroom 2000 capture system used in the College of Computing.

    2. Using the Cognitive Walkthrough evaluation method as your guide, define a formative evaluation technique that might be used to predict the level of seamlessness of a proposed capture system for a specific type of live experience.