A software engineering view of user interface design

Abstract

An interactive system must be designed for usability. But usability is often described through a number of heuristics that are difficult to use directly in the design process. The paper discusses how the software engineer may design for good usability. The most important usability heuristics are related to measurable user interface and software properties which the developer can use in the design process. KeywordsUsability heuristics, software properties of user interfaces.

Improved code defect detection with fault links

“…It does not require that specifications are available for review. The fault types in the taxonomy are significant and have been shown to be important fault types in the past [10,[14][15][16][17][18][19][20]. In total, 10 fault links were found to be strongly supported by the empirical study of Hayes et al [7], and two were weakly supported.…”

Fault Links: Exploring the Relationship Between Module and Fault Types

“…Specifically, the taxonomy only relies on bug reports or problem reports and does not assume that (up to date) specifications or design are available for analysis. The following fault types are significant and have been included because they have been shown to be important fault categories in the past [3,9,10,14,21,23,35,36].…”

“…A natural interface does not cause the user to significantly alter his or her approach to the task in order to interact with the system. Inconsistency [35,21,14] refers to the lack of a pattern of familiarity designed throughout a product. Redundancy [21] in a user interface requires the user to enter unnecessary information for an operation.…”

“…Lack of support [21] refers to the limited amount of assistance the interface provides to the user. Not flexible [21,14] refers to a user interface that narrows the types of users that can work on the software. The user interface must be able to tolerate different levels of user familiarity and performance.…”