Designing Interactive User Interfaces: Dialog Charts and an Assessment of Their Use in Specifying Conceptual Models of Dialogs
35 Pages Posted: 31 Oct 2008
Date Written: August 1989
Abstract
The conceptual design of user interfaces focuses on arriving at a specificationof the structure of the dialog, independent of any particular implementationapproach. There is common agreement as to the importance of this activity toboth IS professionals and end-users, but few -- if any -- modeling methodswere developed to specifically support the process of conceptual design, andthe usefulness of such methods has not been adequately addressed. Thispaper introduces the Dialog Charts (DCs), and documents a preliminaryexamination of their perceived usefulness by designers of user/systeminteraction who actually used them. The DCs yield high level dialog schemasthat are abstract enough to support the conceptual design of dialog controlstructures. In a uniform diagramming framework they combine the concept ofdialog independence, distinguish between the dialog parties, provide forhierarchical decomposition and enforce a structured control flow. Theusefulness of the DCs has been studied empirically in a qualitative inquiry.Recalled experiences of designers were captured and analyzed to ascertainthe concept of usability, as well as assess the usability of the DCs. Usabilityhas emerged from this study as a set of 38 concerns that operationalizes thebroader aspects of purpose of use, design stage, impact on product structure,impact on design process, and attitudinal patterns. In general, the DialogCharts were found by these dialog designers to be a useful, exhibiting theessential attributes of tools for conceptual modeling.
Keywords: Conceptual Design, Evaluation, Dialog models, human-computer interaction, qualitative research
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