EECS 478 - Spring 2000 Midterm

Question 1:

In one of the early homeworks you investigated the interior of an elevator to look at its user interface. These interfaces are still based on physical devices but with the cost of flat panel displays dropping it is possible that in the coming years we will see touch screen LCD panels replacing the existing designs. Assuming you have such technology available, redesign the interior elevator interface to take advantage of this new technology. Note which principles you are using and how they affect your redesign and be specific.

Question 2:
Below is the user interface for IBM’s compact disc playing software – when you start up the software this is what you see, and these are all the controls. Critique this user interface based on what we have talked about in class. Be specific. Then propose your own interface which is appropriate for this application



EECS 478 - Spring 2000 Final Exam


For the third project you created a kiosk for a particular building on campus, and the people would go to the kiosk to get information. Another approach to solving that problem is to let people access that information from a hand-held device. In this final exam you will design a user interface for each of two possible devices. Note that this introduces restrictions and gives additional benefits to the user.

Given a particular building, the user should be able to search by room number, or by the name of that room (or its occupant), or find common things (restrooms, vending machines, and telephones) and get directions from where they currently are to where that place is. Basically you are adapting the functionality from Project 3 to a different user interface.

Q1: 200 points: Assume this device is a small hand-held computer with a small keyboard (with letters, numbers, arrow keys, punctuation, etc) for input, and a 4 level greyscale screen with 640 by 240 pixels for output. The data for all the buildings on campus is stored inside this device. In addition to creating the design, for each major type of screen layout, please describe that layout in terms of the Java swing routines used to create it (i.e. which layout, how big, what parameters).

Q2: 100 points: Assume this device is a portable phone with the standard phone keypad (0-9, #, *) and no graphical display at all. The data for all of the buildings on campus is stored on a central computer that you can call up by dialing its phone number. The computer talks to you using a voice synthesizer. You use your phone keypad for input. In this case the design has no physical graphical layout, but there is a design to the conversation you have with the computer and the information/responses that it provides. You may find some kind of flow-chart like structure useful to describe this interface.

Think about the designs. You have already thought about the general problem through project 3 and the critiques. Do some sketching, and organize your ideas before you try and create the final versions. What you should turn in should only be your final version of each design with appropriate instructions on how it should be used. This must be organized and neat. The grading criterion is the same as those of project 3: how useful is your interface to the user. You may find it beneficial to give examples of how the user interface would work, and you can use your building from project 3 as that example.