IDEAL: An environment to support usability engineering

Abstract

IDEAL—the Interface Development Environment and Analysis Lattice—is an interactive tool environment that supports user-centered interface development activities. Specifically, it supports activities such as:

• • task analysis, user interface design representation, and usability goal specification that occur before formative usability evaluation sessions with users.

• • qualitative and quantitative data collection during formative usability evaluation sessions, and

• • cost/importance and impact analyses, other data analysis techniques, and redesign that occur after formative usability evaluation sessions.

Users of IDEAL are HCI experts—experienced user interface developers (not necessarily programmers) who are knowledgeable in all activities of interface development. A primary goal of IDEAL is to encourage and enable user-centered development, especially focusing on formative evaluation. While other tools, such as traditional user interface management systems (UIMSs), have historically focused on improving the productivity of user interface software programmers, IDEAL supports developers of the user interaction component. This paper describes development, use, and evaluation of IDEAL.