Exercise 2 - Mensch-Maschine-Interaktion 1 (MMI 1)
Wintersemester 2008/09

Exercise 2 - MMI 1

Topic: Law of Steering

3. Lecture

a) Summary

Write a short summary of the lectures on Basic HCI principles (I and II) as held by Prof. Hußmann in the winter term 2006/07. (Video) The summary should be between 200 and 300 words. Focus on the core topics. Put the name(s) of the summary's author(s) beneath it.

b) Further question (~100 words)

What does "Bank managers don’t type…" mean? How would you change the procedure to ensure security?

4. Law of Steering (1/2)

The Law of Steering (Accot and Zhai, 1997) predicts how long it takes a user to navigate a pointer through a tunnel.
Verify the validity of the Steering Law with a small study. The first task is to write a simple application that will be used to conduct the study.

Write a Java application that randomly displays a tunnel of varying length and width. At one end of the tunnel is a starting area, at the other end a goal area. The direction of the tunnel can either be left-right, right-left, up-down, or down-up.
The width of a tunnel is either 16, 32, 64, or 128 px. Its length is either 128, 256, 512, or 1024 px
For each trial the user's pointer is placed in the start area. The task is to steer the pointer to the goal as quickly as possible without touching the edges of the tunnel. The task is completed once the pointer touches the goal area.
Touching the edges of the tunnel is logged as an error and visually indicated to the user.
The application requires the user to play all 4 (width) x 4 (height) x 4 (direction) = 64 combinations, in random order.
The application logs all events to a file for later analysis.

You can include additional features like customizable colors, nice UI, etc.
Submit the application (as a Jar file including source code) and a short readme.txt that explains how to use the application.

Submission

Submit your solution via UniWorx.
Unless otherwise specified, all files have to be either Adobe PDF or UTF-8 plain text. All other files will be automatically deleted.
Please put all files concerning one task into a sub-folder inside the ZIP file.

Schema/Example:

./
	3/
		a/
			summary.txt
		b/
			further_questions.txt
	4/
		steering_app.jar
		readme.txt

Do not use any other directory layout.

Deadline: Monday, 27.10.2008, 09:00 (UTC+2)