UX Trivia Quiz #1 Answers

If you want to try the quiz, it can be found here: http://www.quiz-maker.com/Q3HX007

If you want to look at the results online, you can find that here: http://www.quiz-maker.com/resultsQ3HX007

Overall, 435 people completed this quiz (as of 3/31/17). On the average, they got 5.3 questions right out of 10. The median was 5. Here's a frequency distribution of the number of correct answers:

Here's a breakdown by question:

  1. What was the name of this first Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) from Apple, introduced in 1993?

    Answer: Newton. 76% got this right.

  2. Who published a paper in 1992 entitled Refining the Test Phase of Usability Evaluation: How Many Subjects is Enough? showing that 4-5 participants find about 80% of the problems?
    Answer: Robert Virzi. Only 18% got this right. Many people (67%) incorrectly answered Jakob Nielsen. Nielsen and Landauer published their article, A Mathematical Model of the Finding of Usability Problems in 1993.

  3. In a 1998 paper studying the evaluator effect in usability testing, Jacobsen and John had four evaluators watch the same usability session videos and independently identify the usability issues. What percentage of the total set of issues was identified by all evaluators?
    Answer: 20%. Only 30% got this right. This was a 1998 paper by Niels Jacobsen and Bonnie John. Only 20% of the 93 detected problems were detected by all evaluators, and 46% were detected by only a single evaluator.

  4. Who is this UX pioneer, author of the book "Letting Go of the Words" and co-author of the book "A Practical Guide to Usability Testing?"

    Answer: Ginny Redish. 56% got this right.

  5. What is the name of the law related to human movement which states that the time to rapidly move to a target area (e.g., a button) is a function of the distance to the target and its size?
    Answer: Fitts's Law. 75% got this right.

  6. What famous industrial designer was involved in the design of all these things?

    Answer: Henry Dreyfuss. Only 38% got this right.

  7. Who is this man, the inventor of the World Wide Web?

    Answer: Tim Berners-Lee. 82% got this right (the highest on the quiz)

  8. In a 2006 study, Gitte Lindgaard and her associates concluded that web designers have a certain number of milliseconds for their pages to make a good first impression. What was that number?
    Answer: 50 msec. Only 32% got this right. They very briefly presented images of web pages and asked viewers to rate the visual appeal of the pages. They found that participants were consistent in their ratings even when the images were shown for only 50 msec.

  9. In accessibility, what does the acronym P.O.U.R. stand for?
    Answer: Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust. 67% got this right.

  10. What was the name of this early hypermedia application released by Apple in 1987? (Note: It was commonly used as a prototyping tool.)

    Answer: HyperCard. 61% got this right.

Updated April 14, 2017.

Comments, suggestions for future questions, etc: TomTullis (at) gmail.com