In preparation for our field trip to the McMaster Accelerator and Molecular Beam Epitaxy (MBE) Laboratories, please consider and answer the questions below. Hand in your answers to the assignment below on one side of one sheet of paper (8.5" x 11") at the beginning of class on Monday, November 11.

Be sure to keep a copy of your answers to this assignment for your use during the visits on November 18 and 19.

The academic purpose of our visit is to see two actual control panels for industrial scale equipment exhibiting a variety of human-machine communication modes and aspects of human-machine interaction. Your tasks are to analyze this human-machine interface, assess it and suggest possible improvements. Subsequent written assignments and the final examination may contain related questions.

For information on the Accelerator and the MBE, see web page AccMBE\AcceleratorMBE.html.

This assignment: preparation for your visit

In preparing for this visit, think about the following questions and record your answers. Hand in one copy as your solution to this Assignment 5 and keep at least one copy for your reference during the visits.

1. What are your goals for this visit, i.e. what do you expect to achieve by visiting the accelerator and MBE control rooms?

2. What information do you want to collect during your visit? Express your answer to this question in the form of a list of your questions to be answered during the visit.

Suggestion: Use the material in section 4.5 in our textbook by Shneiderman (see pages 135-144) as a checklist for compiling your list of questions. Do not copy this material slavishly, however; it is much too extensive for this purpose and some parts are more relevant than others.

Your questions should be designed to help you to identify the positive and negative aspects of the user interface for monitoring and controlling the accelerator and the MBE installation and to elicit information you will need to make suggestions for improvements. Remember that you will want not only to determine which aspects of the human-machine interface are useful and less useful to the users, but also to understand in sufficient detail

• the requirements of its human users,
• the tasks to be performed by the system and
• the current system structure