Methods and tools: a method for evaluating the communicability of user interfaces

Abstract

User interfaces can be viewed as one-shot, higher-order messages sent from designers to users. The content of such messages is a designer's conception of who the users are, what their needs and expectations are, and, more important, how the designer has chosen to meet these requirements through an interactive artifact. The form of the messages is an interactive language (i.e., a series of organized dialog patterns determining how and which other lower-order messages can be exchanged between users and systems. From this perspective, user interface design is a semiotic engineering task [1] whose target is to convey the specific principles of communication that are embedded in any software artifact. Thus, designers should be assisted in achieving this goal and in evaluating how well they do it in different situations.