CS 3724 Final Exam Information – Fall 2005

Schedule:

The final exam is scheduled for Wednesday, December 14, 2:05-4:05 PM, in McBryde 216.

Format:

The exam period is 2 hours long. The exam length should allow everyone to finish within that time period. The exam will consist of three sections: terms, short answer and essay.

• The terms section will ask you to define important HCI terms or provide a term based on its definition. There will be approximately 10 questions in this section, and the section will count for 30% of the exam grade.
• The short answer section will ask brief (1 paragraph or less) factual or conceptual questions. There will be approximately 6 questions in this section, and the section will count for 30% of the exam grade.
• The essay section will ask you to write thoughtful, critical, and creative answers to more complex, open-ended questions. These questions will not have a "right answer" (although factual errors will decrease your score). You will be graded on the strength of your arguments and your demonstrated understanding of the concepts addressed in the question. There will be 2 questions in this section, and the section will count for 40% of the exam grade.

Material covered:

The final exam covers the second half of the semester. Of course, this does not mean that you can forget what you learned in the first half, but the focus of the questions will be on second-half topics. The topics of interest, and the corresponding chapters in the Rosson textbook, are:

• Prototyping (chapter 6)
• Goals of prototyping
• Decisions and tradeoffs made in prototyping
• Prototyping approaches
• Prototyping tools
• Evaluation (chapter 7)
• Goals of evaluation
• Evaluation within the usability engineering lifecycle
• Basic evaluation types
• Specific evaluation approaches
• Issues in designing and running usability evaluations
• Parts of an empirical evaluation
• Summarizing and analyzing empirical results
• Usability specifications
• Emerging paradigms (chapter 9)
• Descriptions of emerging areas of HCI from the textbook
• CSCW: definition, issues, specific research questions
• 3DI and VE: definitions, issues, research questions
• Documentation (chapter 8)
• Goals of documentation
• What types of things are considered documentation?
• Users' needs for documentation
• Tradeoffs between paper and electronic documentation
• Specific documentation approaches

What to study & how to study:

Start by reviewing the lecture slides and your personal notes from lectures. This will help you focus on the key ideas from each chapter (the things the instructor thinks are important, anyway!). Look for important terms and their definitions, important concepts (e.g. evaluation approaches, prototyping tradeoffs, pros and cons of various documentation systems) – you should be able to explain the concept and the issues involved to someone who has not taken this class. Look for discussion questions that we talked about in class – these are good examples of possible essay questions on the exam.

Use the textbook to supplement your understanding as you review the lecture notes (e.g. to flesh out a definition). Of course, if you did not read the chapters during the semester, it would be helpful to skim sections that correspond to the things we emphasized in class.

Finally, do a brief review of the first half of the semester to remind yourself of the bigger picture of the usability engineering process, and how the topics we covered in the second half fit into the process.