| In this era where people surround themselves
with a growing number of devices that offer increasingly more
complex functionality, the demand for effortless access to
this functionality is becoming more recognised. Designers set
out to make their design more understandable and come up with
usable user interfaces. The idea of building a device out of
separate components is gaining wider recognition among
designers. Architectures for user-system interaction describe
how user interface can be constructed in a modular way.
Elementary interaction components such as pop-up menus,
keyboards, sliders, etc. form the basis for complex
interaction components. These compounded interaction
components are used to create even higher-level interaction
components, on top of which eventually entire user interfaces
are built.
Throughout the design process, designers can rely on
several design guidelines that give direction to their design
choices. A number of evaluation techniques have been developed
to estimate the overall usability of a design and to pinpoint
possible usability problems. However existing observational
evaluation techniques do not reveal the contributions of the
separate lower-level and higher-level interaction components
to the overall usability. Often, the identification of
interaction components that hamper overall usability are
identified informally by user interface experts studying the
video tapes of the experiments. This is a subjective and
time-consuming process |
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| In this project a different
approach is applied: the creation of interaction logs during
usability experiments. In these logs, messages exchanged
between the interaction components are recorded with a time
stamp. Analysis of these log files could shed some light on
the usability of the individual constituent components, and
their contribution to the usability of the total interface.
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In particular, the aim of this project is:
i) to develop observational evaluation
techniques for measuring effectiveness, efficiency and
learnability of interaction components at various levels of
abstraction in the interaction process;
ii) to determine how the usability of higher level
interaction components is influenced by the usability of their
supporting lower level interaction components and vice versa.
My Ph.D. thesis is
online available but also
a short summary
is available (just send me an email if you are interested
in a printed copy of the thesis).
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Ph.D.-student:
Copromotor:
promoters: |
Ir. W.P. Brinkman
Dr.ir. R. Haakma
Prof.dr. D.G. Bouwhuis and Prof.dr. P.M.E. De Bra |
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