Towards specifying and evaluating the human factors of user-computer interfaces

ABSTRACT

Despite the current interest in user-computer interfaces, the design of a good interface remains to a great extent an art, with much argument over guidelines and principles for interface design. Pertinent information, scattered throughout the literature of psychology, graphic design. linguistics, hardware design, and under the general umbrella of computer science, is only gradually being gathered into survey publications for application by computer scientists [1,4,12,15]. Our purpose is to design a specification language which will serve as a vehicle for the design of and experimentation with user-computer interfaces. The specification language not only defines the external characteristics of the interface, but can also be analyzed to determine whether the interface meets a set of generally-accepted human factors guidelines. We believe the language is general enough to be used with principles of interface design other than those we have proposed.

REFERENCES

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.2 User Interfaces (D.2.2, H.1.2, I.3.6)

Additional Classification:
  F. Theory of Computation
  F.4 MATHEMATICAL LOGIC AND FORMAL LANGUAGES
      F.4.3 Formal Languages

  H. Information Systems
  H.1 MODELS AND PRINCIPLES
      H.1.2 User/Machine Systems
          Subjects: Human factors

General Terms:
Human Factors, Languages