ESTIM : A Support System for Task-based Evaluation of User Interface

ESTIM : 사용자 직무지식에 기반한 인터페이스 평가 지원시스템

Evaluation of user interfaces has to be performed in an intuitive and subjective manner by experts especially when the problem comes to the complexity and consistency of sophisticated interface procedures. The manual analysis and evaluation of logical interfaces also tends to be slow and laborious. To make the evaluation more formal and objective, the criteria and the procedure with which the evaluation can proceed must be explicitly prescribed. Furthermore, to make the formal procedure as practical as subjective expert evaluation, the criteria must reflect the user knowledge of the target tasks since the task knowledge plays the role of a basis for users to understand the interface organizations and procedures. This paper describes ESTIM, a support system for task-based evaluation of user interface, that includes the interface evaluation criteria and implies an evaluation procedure. The support system can be used either in an interactive manner by the analyst during the evaluation or in an automatic evaluation mode. It was verified that the result of automatic evaluation by ESTIM matched the results of expert evaluation fairly well.