Validação de uma metodologia de projeto de interfaces usuário-computador.

Abstract

Interactive processes have attached growing importance to the user in recent years. Currently many of the designers try to produce high quality interfaces. Most of them begin to include human factors principles and processes in their activities, without being necessarily human factors experts. Several solutions are possible in interface design owe to a rapid growth in the computer user community and to a number of trends on information processing, cognitive psychology and usability engineering. Sophisticated technologies for interface design commercially available offer also a powerful support. Nevertheless, these factors per si do not assure a good interface design. Interface design documentation provide a vital contribution to build new products, either as bad examples to be avoided or as a set of consistent guidelines. User involvement in both the development and evaluation of design is another relevant aspect to be taken into account. The present study reports and validates an evaluation methodology of a character-oriented user interface of a digital image processing system - SITIM-150. Based both on the subjective user satisfaction and on a set of technical strategies and guidelines compiled from the traditional literature, this two-stage approach has reckoned upon 50 and 15 participants. The guidelines set presented here are also useful for the design of most applications which include man-computer interfaces. These are labelled into four groups: general guidelines, guidelines for the design of screens and dialogues and for the design of conventional/online interface documentation. A questionnaire based on a pair of semantic and numerical differential scales was employed for measuring the user's reactions to various technical and human factors. Faults concerning to structural and semantic consistency, chromatic resources use, message conception and access to lists were registered. An interaction approach based on graphical resources commonly used by most of the interactive application processes was proposed.