USAYPT or USIYPT is a physics research competition ran by Greg Jacobs.

2022

My own work doc for the 2022 Tuning Forks problem is here.

General Tips

• When in doubt, ask about error prop
• ANSWER THE RESEARCH QUESTION (elevator)
• Convey that you understand basics via presentation
• Have intuition regarding phenomenon
• Be able to explain every formula from first principles
• Order of magnitude and dimension analysis
• Have clear variance in parameters (what did you vary and why)
• What does the intercepts mean on graphs?
• “Don’t be obtuse”
• Connect to simple physics terms
• Explanations needs to be simple
• Engage discussion

User Experience is the

The User Experience design sprung out of WWII—in Aerospace engineering.

The Design Process

The “Double Diamond” Process

First Round of Going Broad

• Explore the problem space (what are you users trying to do? why? why is it hard?)
• Decide what to fix (what is the most high impact problem?)

Second Round of Going Broad

• Test potential solutions (does this fix the problem?)
• Refine final solution (do all users understand this? can they use them?)

Usability Heuristics

Usability Heuristics is a set of principles used in User Experience design to identify problems and potential solutions.

Goal: understand the user.

Find out…

• Motivation
• Context
• Deeper need?

The goal of user interviews is to understand the user even if they know what they want!

Good User Interviews

• Make person feel welcome/safe/appreciated

• Ask open-ended “questions”

  • Describe a time that…
  • Tell me more about..

• Leave space: awkward silences (not too awkward)

• Really listen!; repress the urge to think of what you want to say next

• Repeat statements back to people

utility elicitation is the process to go from Rational Preferences to a utility function. Its a bad idea to use money to do this, because money is not linear.

Consider the best and worst possible events:

\begin{equation} \overline{S}, \underline{S} \end{equation}

We assign the best event to have utility \(1\), and worst to have utility \(0\):

\begin{equation} \begin{cases} U(\overline{S}) = 1 \\ U(\underline{S}) = 0 \end{cases} \end{equation}

Given some test event now \(S\), we try to find the \(p\) such that we can set up a lottery: