Designing the user interface using rapid prototyping

The aim of this study was to evaluate and improve the menu interface design of an existing expert system. The system provided expertise concerned with evaluating human response to environments and was implemented onto a computer with a simple tree menu system. Two laboratory based experiments were carried out in which alternative menu interface designs were developed rapidly and compared with the original design. User acceptance tests which incorporated objective and subjective measures were iteratively used to evaluate and improve the interface designs. The results of these experiments indicated that, for the particular system under study, a graphic based design which displayed 58 options divided into levels on a single screen was preferred by users over the original menu interface which displayed one menu at a time with seven options per screen. The final interface remains to be tested under field conditions.