HCI Area Qualifying Exam (Written Portion)

HCI Area Qualifying Exam (Written Portion)

Fall Semester 2004
Friday, October 29, 9am-5pm.

Answer FOUR questions as follows: Answer any TWO of the four questions from Section A (HCI Process and Theory); From Section B (Special Topics in HCI) answer ONE question from EACH of your TWO declared areas of specializations.

Each of the four questions you answer will be given equal weight.

You will be assigned an identifying number and are required to hand in printed or written copies of your answers with each page identified only by that number. This enables us to grade your answers anonymously. You should NOT identify yourself explicitly by name on your answer sheets or implicitly by referring in the first person to your work (my project on ABC).

Please answer each question starting on a new page, with your answer following the text of the question. To avoid having to type the questions yourself, electronic copies of the questions will be available after 9am from a URL that you should already have been given. You may copy the questions from there.

Place any relevant references that you cite in an answer at the end of that answer, NOT in a separate section at the end of the whole exam.

If you have any questions or feel it necessary to make any assumptions in your answers, do not seek clarification from faculty or staff. Simply record your assumptions as part of your answer.

Section A: HCI Process and Theory – answer any TWO of questions 1 through 4.

1. The Genter and Nielsen paper, "The Anti-Mac Interface," argues that the opposite of the Macintosh interface design principles creates, in itself, a consistent and usable user interface, but for a different class of users. The paper is a classic -- though it's several years old, its criticism of the Mac interface (and implicitly Windows as a derivative work) holds true and is even more of a problem (e.g., see-and-point really fails with gigabytes of digital pictures, sounds, and movies).

To remind you, here are the design principles for the Mac and Anti-Mac interfaces:

Mac

- Metaphors

- Direct Manipulation

- See and Point

- Consistency

- WYSIWYG

- User Control

- Feedback and Dialog

- Forgiveness

- Aesthetic Integrity

- Modelessness

Anti-Mac

- Reality

- Delegation

- Describe and Command

- Diversity

- Represent meaning

- Shared control

- System handles details

- Model user actions

- Graphic Variety

- Richer Cues

Pick any two of the below claims and BOTH support and refute it. None of these is completely true, nor completely false. Provide compelling arguments for both sides of the two claims you adopt.

(a) "The Anti-Mac interface isn't a futuristic interface -- the years-old Emacs and LaTeX is the Anti-Mac interface for most publication tasks. It meets the needs of the target user for the Anti-Mac interface better than the futuristic vision of the Starfire video."

(b) "Real reality is a better UI than modeled reality. Augmented reality and ubiquitous computing together can be used to create a better Anti-Mac interface than what Genter and Nielsen propose."

(c) "Gentner and Nielsen almost got it right -- we do want 'shared control,' but not shared between the computer and the user. Instead, we want 'shared control' between groups of users. Collaboration is the way to create the alternative to the Mac interface. The Wiki (e.g., Wikipedia, Wikibooks, etc.) represents a viable user interface alternative to the Mac interface for the same user audience as Gentner and Nielsen's Anti-Mac interface."

(d) "Gentner and Nielsen missed the boat--the only interface that most users see today is whatever their Web browser can put up. A Web browser is neither the Mac or Anti-Mac user interfaces, but it is a viable alternative to both in that is just as useful for some users and just as unusable for other classes of users."

(e) "Neither the Mac nor the Anti-Mac user interface is appropriate anymore. Everyone needs a Mac-like interface when engaged with a new task, and everyone wants an increasingly Anti-Mac-like interface when they became more expert at the task. Therefore, the real answer is adaptive user interfaces, not just Mac or Anti-Mac."

2. In any study, there are potential "threats to validity"--things that may diminish the value or generalizability of results. How are the typical threats/things to watch out for different for quantitative and qualitative studies of human-computer interaction? Apply this to your own work and discuss.

3. Describe two aspects of a desktop GUI that appear to have been designed with an understanding of human cognition but not necessarily social cognition. Imagine that UI moved to a shared, public space. What will need to be changed as a result and how would social cognition influence the redesign?

4. Discuss the role of emotion in user interfaces and HCI.

(a) Discuss two existing systems that make use of emotional expression.

(b) Describe the potential benefits of incorporating emotion into interaction design.

(d) Speculate about the future: In your opinion, will emotion play a greater role in interfaces. If so, how? If not, why not?

Section B: Special Topics in HCI

User Interface Software – answer ONE of questions 5 and 6.

5. The event queue in most modern GUI systems is designed to present applications with information about the details of events that occurred (e.g. which key or mouse button the user pressed, at what time, with what modifier keys held down, what widget received the event). As we move away from traditional desktop computing, new types of events will require redesigning the event queue.

(a) Choose two research papers that provide more information about user actions than keyboard and mouse activity. Discuss how they provided functionality equivalent to traditional event queues, focusing particularly on similarities to and differences from the traditional approach.

(b) Traditional event queues and callback mechanisms assume that reported events actually happened. As we move toward systems that integrate sensors, we will need to modify our interaction architectures to support uncertainty. Propose a new architecture for managing (by the OS) and responding (by applications) to events that accounts for uncertainty.

6. Manually created and automagically generated user interfaces have competed before, during the development of tools for creating WIMP interfaces, and manually created interfaces one. With the increasing proliferation of cheap, networked devices this competition is beginning again.

(a) Choose a recent research effort on automagically generating user interfaces and describe how it works, its strengths, and its weaknesses.

(b) Predict whether manually created or automagically generated interfaces will win this new competition. Present a well-reasoned argument defending your prediction.

Information Visualization – answer ONE of questions 7 and 8.

7. It has been stated that information visualization systems under-utilize research from the field of human perception.

(a) Speculate on why this is so.

(b) List two techniques/systems from Information Visualization that do appear to take good advantage of knowledge about human perception.

8. Someone's department chair once remarked that the difficulty of pursuing research in the human sciences is that the average person's reaction to any discovery or invention is either "That's obvious: common sense would tell you that" or "That's ridiculous: everyone knows that things don't work like that." How justified are these reactions to research in Information Visualization? (After all, everyone knows that a picture is worth a thousand words.) Pick two visualization techniques that in your opinion are not obvious and yet are demonstrably successful in the presentation (and possibly manipulation) of complex information sets. Explain the source of their success and why no one would have predicted their utility before the advent of computing.