Numerous methods to evaluate user interfaces have been investigated. These methods vary greatly in the attention paid to the users' tasks. Some methods require detailed task descriptions while others are task-independent. Unfortunately, collecting detailed task information can be difficult. On the other hand, task-independent methods cannot evaluate a design for the tasks users actually perform. The goal of this research is to develop a metric, which incorporates simple task descriptions, that can assist designers in organizing widgets in the user interface. Simple task descriptions provide some of the benefits, without the difficulties, of performing a detailed task analysis. The metric, Layout Appropriateness (LA), requires a description of the sequences of widget-level actions users perform and how frequently each sequence is used. This task description can either be from observations of an existing system or from a simplified task analysis. The appropriateness of a given layout is ...

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The central question for this paper is how to improve the production process by closing the gap between industrial designers and software engineers of television(TV)-based User Interfaces (UI) in an industrial environment. Software engineers are highly interested whether one UI design can be converted into several fully functional UIs for TV products with different screen properties. The aim of the software engineers is to apply automatic layout and scaling in order to speed up and improve the production process. However, the question is whether a UI design lends itself for such automatic layout and scaling. This is investigated by analysing a prototype UI design done by industrial designers. In a first requirements study, industrial designers had created meta annotations on top of their UI design in order to disclose their design rationale for discussions with software engineers. In a second study, industrial designers assessed the potential of four different meta annotation approaches. The question was which annotation method industrial designers would prefer and whether it could satisfy the technical requirements of the software engineering process. One main result is that the industrial designers preferred the method they were already familiar with, which therefore seems to be the most effective one although the main objective of automatic layout and scaling could still not be achieved. 1.

We propose a new method for assessing the perceptual organization of information graphics, based on the premise that the visual structure of an image should match the structure of the data it is intended to convey. The core of our method is a new formal model of perceptual structure, based on classical machine vision techniques for analyzing an image at multiple resolutions. The model takes as input an arbitrary grayscale image and returns a lattice structure describing the visual organization of the image. We show how this simple model captures several aspects of traditional design aesthetics, and we describe a software tool that implements the model to help designers analyze and refine visual displays. Our emphasis here is demonstrating the model’s potential as a design aid rather than as a description of human perception, but given its initial promise we propose that it merits further study and describe a variety of ways in which the model could be extended and validated.