Final Exam Review - IS U570 Human Computer Interaction -- Fall 2004

Professor Futrelle

The exam will take place on Friday, December 17th from 1pm to 3pm in room 312 EL (Ell Hall).
The major topics you are responsible for our listed below. I will go over this list in class on Tuesday, December 7th, our last class.

Some important advice on how to prepare for and take the exam

Practice writing out what you know about each of the topics below. Do this with the book closed and do not do it immediately after you have read the section. Instead, do the writing on a different day than your reading. When you're reading, make up a few questions of the type you think I'll ask and write them down. Then, a day or two later, write your answers. Then go back to your book to see how you did. Some of the review topics below are of the form, "... discuss so-and-so ....". This should give you a lot of guidance as to what to practice writing about.

Your writing should be technical and precise. When writing answers on the Final, you are writing for me, your teacher, so you should be as technical as you can. In critiquing your practice writing look for filler phrases and fluffy phrases that take many words but don't say anything very precise. Avoid such writing. This doesn't mean being telegraphic in style, just precise.

Important: Students often learn certain technical terms and put them in their answers, but give no information that assures me that they have any idea what the term means. For example, many people use the term "short-term memory" in their answers, but say nothing more about it, so I have doubts as to whether they really understand it. An real example would be the fact that you can generally rely on a user recalling that a certain newly discovered command is on a menu they very recently used. Long-term memory would allow them to remember the menu location of an often-used command after not using the application for a few days. (See the discussion in Chapter 11.)

You could do your practice answer writing with a partner or in a small group and have other people grade your answers, using the book as their guide.

The more you practice as described above, the more you'll learn, and the better you'll do.

Below is a list of the answers you should be able to produce.

• Chapter 1: Memorize and be able to discuss the five usability measures listed there.


• Chapter 2: Give a thorough discussion of one or two of the eight golden rules (no need to memorize them; you simply must be ready to discuss them -- examples help).


• Chapter 3: Give good discussions of the Envision and/or Discovery stages of the LUCID design methodology.
  Create your own original scenario and be ready to present it if such a question is asked (Sec. 3.7).


• Chapter 4: Explain acceptance tests well enough so you can then explain why they are sometimes adversarial. (Among other things, learn how to spell "adversarial".)


• Chapter 6: Describe some of the problems of direct manipulation, but not including the movement from mouse to keyboard and back.


• Chapter 12: Practice creating and critiquing different styles of messages as discussed in Section 12.2, pages 479-484.


• Chapter 13: Give a thorough discussion that compares online help and manuals with paper material.

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