What’s on the Midterm Exam

Date: Monday, October 19, 2009

Points: 100 points

Materials:

McCracken (usability): Chapters 16, Appendix

McFarland (JavaScript): Chapters 1-6 and 13 (p. 463-481)

History of the web (see link from Schedule page)

Usability guidelines (see links from Schedule page)

Lab assignments

What you learned from doing critiques

What you learned from doing projects

Suggested Usability Study Topics (about 75-80%)

History of the web

Usability guidelines

Usability and its benefits

User-Centered Development Methodology

Senses

Perception

Memory – hierarchical model of memory, chunking, recognition vs. recall

Interruptions

Mental Models

Metaphor

Design implications for human cognition

Organizational schemes for content management – exact, ambiguous

Organizational structures for content management – hierarchy, hypertext, database

Principles of visual organization – proximity, alignment, consistency, contrast

Navigation

- Navigation systems – hierarchical, ad hoc, database driven

- Conventional understandings about navigation

- Menus

- Built-in browser navigational aids

- Strategies for effective site navigation

Suggested Scripting Study Topics (about 20-25%)

Scripting – client-side vs. server side

HTML, XHTML, CSS

alert boxes

Numbers and strings

Selectors – how to interpret them

Events and event handlers

Objects, properties, functions

Regular expressions

Forms, Validation

Arrays

if, while, do-while, for

Debugging

Format:

Multiple choice, true/false, matching, short answer

Essay (majority of test)

No code writing

Reading XHTML, CSS and/or JavaScript code (approx 20-25%)