Human-computer interface design and implementation details

Abstract

The paper presents a model of how the availability of implementation details affects performance in designing a human-computer interface. Two experiments have been used to test the validity of this model. The experiments involved varying the amount of implementation detail presented to interface designers and having the designers perform an interface design task. The amount of work performed and the quality of the resulting human-computer interface design are analysed.

The results presented in this paper show that the quality of a human-computer interface design improves if the designer is presented with some information about implementation details. However, presenting a designer with all implementation details of the system functions results in a lower quality design. The relevance of these results to human-computer interface design and future directions for research are discussed.