HW2 Options:  CS305, Fall 2008

Each student must do a 2nd "small" homework.  See other pages and class announcements for deadlines.

(1) Physical Design Homework, Option A (individual assignment)

Use a GUI builder like Jigloo or Visual Studio  to demonstrate the use of a UI design pattern that requires you to organize UI components and containers. Good UI design patterns to consider include:
See the web page for shown in class more ideas and details: http://designinginterfaces.com/

Note: Degree of difficulty can affect the grade from an average grade (B or 85%) to an A or A+.

(2) Physical Design Homework, Option B (individual assignment)

Use a GUI builder like Jigloo or Visual Studio to create a particular window that addresses a particular task and create a good UI layout that demonstrates grouping, good use of color, icons, menus, etc. In other words, is should demonstrate what's been learned about layout, grouping, etc. Discuss your design and what you've tried to achieve and why.

Note: Degree of difficulty can affect the grade from an average grade (B or 85%) to an A or A+.

(3) Use of Morae Tool for Evaluation (group of 2 or 3)

See the homepage for this tool and watch all or part of the Online Demo video.  A student will present and demo on Morae soon in class, also.

You'll need to define a simple evaluation of a SW product (like you did in HW1), then do an evaluation with at least one subject (preferably two -- the 2nd can be on your own team) using the product running with Morae in our lab.  You'll then analyze the video and data collected with Morae and create a slide show with video extract and reports on some data discovered.

(4) Research Paper Summary (individual)

One of the objectives of the course will be to familiarize you with some of the latest research in HCI and computer interfaces. By reading papers you will get a better idea how researchers go about solving problems. Find a paper in an academic research journal or conference that interests you. You will find papers involving displays, speech recognition, speech synthesis, haptics, PDAs, 3D user interfaces, gesture recognition, virtual reality, and even brain-machine interfaces. Choose two papers published in the last five years.

Write a 1-2 page summary for each of two papers.

Where do I find papers?

There are two premier CS professional organizations, the Association of Computer Machinery (ACM) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). They both have digital libraries of all the publications that come from their conferences and journals.

Also, there are a number of interesting article available on the Microsoft usability lab's publications page.

Important:  You can access articles in the IEEE and ACM digital libraries from free but only from UVa IP addresses only.  From off-Grounds, you can use the UVaAnywhere-Lite WebVPN, described here or you may find it easier to go to a UVa lab and download the files there.
Summary Organization
Please delineate the sections using the following headings:

(5) Software Apps for Children (individual)

I have some ideas about this, so if you're interested in this, get in touch!