Exam 3 Info

Info on Exam 3, CS3205, Spring 2017

Clarification and updates will be posted here:

See clarifications at end of this page and the green "updated" icon(s) below.

When: The "normal" time to take Exam 3 in class will be during part of the final exam period, Thursday, May 4, 10am-noon, THN 303 (our normal classroom). It will be designed to be a roughly half the length of the previous two exams. If you have an issue with taking it at the normal time, see the Collab announcement about this that was sent on Friday, April 28, and contact the instructor as soon as possible.

Format: The exam will be closed-book and no notes. It will be a mix of short answer and "writing questions".

Important: As noted early in the class, part of your score will be based on how well you express your answers using the vocabulary and terminology as defined in HCI. For example, you may identify and describe a usability problem but not in the way that someone trained in HCI would talk about it -- you will not get full credit in this case.

What's covered: The exam will be only on material that was not covered on Exam 2, starting with the material in slide set "Detailed Design, Part 1". Below is a list of readings that match what's been discussed in class.

Readings:

Some material on windows and icons are discussed in Section 6.2.2 in printed book (in Ch. 5 of our e-version).
Duck book Chapter 4, the section on “Basics of Page Layout”. The link takes you to the Safari on-line library, which in princple should be viewable if you authenticate with NetBadge. But if you have problems, you can see this in file duck-book-4.1.pdf in Resources on Collab.
Section of book on design patterns, Section 12.3 in printed book (in Ch. 11 of our e-version)
Tog on Fitts’ Law.
Section of book on Fitts' law (3 pages), Section 15.4 in printed book (in Ch. 14 of our e-version)
Gestalt Principles and UI Design
ID Book, chapter on "Evaluation: Inspections, Analytics, and Models." Chapter 15 in printed book (Ch. 14 of our e-version) , but no questions on Section 15.3 on Analytics. (18 pages to read in this chapter, including 15.4.1 on Fitts' Law.)

Topics:
Here's a list of topics. It's not guaranteed to be complete, but it's a good start to help you study your notes from class and assess what you know.

Detailed (or physical) UI Design

Windows/screens
Focus: window-focus, focus within windows (nothing on the Thunderbird/Mozilla example of focus within applications)
Widgets within windows: Buttons, toolbars, menus
Example screens and windows (from slides) and issues related to those.
Text and color (from the slides only, no readings)

Evaluation topics from Chapter 15

Heuristic evaluation and walkthroughs
Fitts' law and related issue of size and distance.

Clarifications!

Nothing on UI Flow (slides at start of set 12).
On UI Design Patterns from Duck book and Section 12.3: know what a UI design pattern is; also, know high-level details about at least two of the patterns from the website. We discussed the 4 listed on slide 17 in class, so maybe those are good choices to study. Details can be found on the web site (direct link)
Slides on menus: nothing on exam on slides 66-79 from slide set 12
FYI, In Tuesday's class I had an older version of this document on the screen, and you saw a couple of things then that had never been in the posted document.