Professor Futrelle - CCIS - Northeastern University - October, 2010
The Midterm will be held in class on Friday, October 29th
The class on Tuesday, October 26 will be devoted to reviewing for Midterm.
Contents
IS4300 HCI Fall 2010 - Midterm Review
Use technical concepts and terminology
The course is primarily based on the papers you have read. But there has been some important material in lectures I have given. I will only ask about lecture material when I can’t point you to the papers or chapters that it covered, so you can read the material yourself. The central references are [2,8,10, 11, 12,13] and the first chapters of [3] and [6].
This is the most important guideline for the Midterm, and for all the material you write in this course, including your project. You still have a tendency to write in too much of a nontechnical style, using general terms rather than HCI specific terminology. Of course the terms and concepts should be used in context, related to the questions or in your project. In your Midterm, mentioning an author’s name and a paper by him/her is a plus.
The best way to prepare for a test in which you have to write, is write. Reading and highlighting doesn’t focus on the acts of thinking and writing. During the exam, you are welcome to get an extra blue book that you can use to do notes and outlines of your answers. It’s not always easy to just plunge in and write your answer with no outline to guide you. I will only grade your answers, not your notes.
Here is a short list of some terms and phrases which express important HCI concepts. Hopefully you’ll think of a few more and use them where appropriate.
I lectured on search user interfaces, based on chapter 1 of Hearst’s book [3], available in full online at,
http://searchuserinterfaces.com/book/sui_ch1_design.html
It is a long chapter, but you should familiarize yourself with it.
We discussed the Bush article [9], though it was not formally assigned. Worth knowing about. Some earlier class writings on it are at,
http://tinyurl.com/is4300f10-opinionsOnBush2009
The most important slides I presented in the Friday, October 22 class, was Chapter 7, “Data Gathering” of the Interaction Design book: http://www.id-book.com/chapter7_teaching.htm
These were gathered via EndNote. For books, I searched the Library of Congres remote site from within EndNote. For papers I used Google Scholar, with its preferences set to include EndNote citations.
I have not given links to each item below. They’re easy enough to find, and you probably have hard copies of some of them. If not, and they’re relevant, you would do well to print them out and write notes on them.
[1] A. F. Blackwell, et al., "Restricted Focus Viewer: A Tool for Tracking Visual Attention http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~tonyj/RFV/," in Theory and Application of Diagrams, M. Anderson, et al., Eds., ed Edinburgh: Springer, 2000, pp. 162-177.
[2] P. Carter, "Liberating usability testing," Interactions, vol. 14, pp. 18-22, 2007.
[3] M. Hearst, Search user interfaces. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
[4] B. Moggridge, Designing interactions. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007.
[5] D. A. Norman, The design of everyday things, 1st Basic paperback. ed. New York: Basic Books, 2002.
[6] D. A. Norman, "Human-centered design considered harmful," Interactions, vol. 12, pp. 14-19, 2005.
[7] H. Sharp, et al., Interaction design : beyond human-computer interaction, 2nd ed. Chichester ; Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2007.
[8] C. Wilson, "Designing useful and usable questionnaires: you can't just throw a questionnaire together," Interactions, vol. 14, 2007.
[9] V. Bush, "As We May Think," Atlantic Monthly, vol. 176, p. 101, 1945.
[10] J. Arnowitz and E. Dykstra-Erickson, "Observation and interaction design: lessons from the past," Interactions, vol. 14, p. 64, 2007.
[11] D. Norman, "Signifiers, not affordances," Interactions, vol. 15, pp. 18-19, 2008.
[12] C. Le Dantec and W. Edwards, "Designs on dignity: perceptions of technology among the homeless," in CHI 2008, 2008, pp. 627-636.
[13] E. Gilbert, et al., "The network in the garden: an empirical analysis of social media in rural life," presented at the Proceeding of the twenty-sixth annual SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, Florence, Italy, 2008.