Exploring how experienced and unexperienced designers use and evaluate a usability-oriented interaction and navigation model

Anna Beatriz Marques,Tayana Conte,Simone Diniz Junqueira Barbosa

doi:10.5753/jis.2018.709

Abstract

Representing quality aspects in models used in the design of interactive systems can support to design solutions with higher quality of use. However, the quality of the designed solutions can be influenced by the designers’ experience and by the models’ expressiveness for representing the quality aspects. Recently, we proposed USINN (USability-oriented INteraction and Navigation model) to express usability mechanisms in interaction and navigation modeling solutions. In this paper, we present an experimental study conducted with students, characterized as experienced and unexperienced designers, in order to investigate how is USINN adopted and evaluated by designers with different levels of experience in the software industry. The results indicated that the quality of artifacts produced by experienced and unexperienced designers was similar. However, the unexperienced designers indicated higher intention to adopt USINN in the software industry.

Highlights

The software industry has increasingly focused on offering high-quality interactive system to users [1]
Since the system is only perceived by users through what they can see and with what they can interact, the success of an interactive system is inexorably related to the quality of its user interface [3]
In order to improve the quality of user interfaces, we can focus on first designing interaction rather than interfaces [4]

Summary

Introduction

The software industry has increasingly focused on offering high-quality interactive system to users [1]. Usability is a quality attribute that affects the user interaction with the system, when the system provides commands to allow users to undo actions, to validate user requests and to provide appropriate feedback [5]. Task models are an established approach to this end, representing alternative paths to reach the same goal requires the development of different task models and it is difficult to take advantage of rich control flows and contexts [10]. Such limitations can be addressed by the use of interaction models [10][11]. Modeling the navigational perspective according to the way in which the user wishes to explore the application helps to obtain more usable navigational paths [14]

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Conclusion