ETAG-based Design: User Interface Design as User Mental Model Design

Abstract

It is hard to expect that Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) or Cognitive Ergonomics will be taken as a serious candidate to contribute to the design of computer systems as long as it has little more to offer then a plea to consider “computer usability” and a huge collection of methods, tools and insights that rather seem organized around the concept of novelty (Newman 1993), instead of being organized in terms of the particular design questions they propose to answer. The focus of attention in HCI research, as we perceive it, is on multitude of activities that support computer system design, rather than constitute it, such as handling standards and guidelines, usability engineering, design rationale, and user interface analysis and evaluation. Even in the area of formal modelling, the subject matter of this paper, research has generally shifted away from design methods towards analysis of partial design aspects such as predicting user performance and measuring consistency of design products.