An Automated Evaluation and Critiquing Aid for User Interface Design

We will leverage our prior work on Adaptive Information Management (AIM) to provide a core reasoning capability for use in an interactive and quantitative evaluation aid to assist designers in developing user interfaces (UIs). We have a task-linked information representation and associated algorithms for reasoning about the information needs of a set of user tasks, the information presentation capabilities of a set of devices and formats, and the degree of match between the two. These have served as the basis of multiple, successful AIM systems in the past. In Phase I, we developed an architecture for making our core representation more interactive and subject to user guidance-- turning our AIM into a Multi-modal Advisor for Interface Design (a MAID). We demonstrated the effectiveness of the resulting evaluation algorithm in a set of 10 "walkthrough" experiments illustrating quantitative feedback on the adequacy of interface concepts for the types of procedures and displays under consideration for NASA's Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV). In Phase 2, we propose to implement a prototype version of this approach in an integrated suite of software tools for procedure authoring and demonstrate it on a set of procedure execution displays for a NASA vehicle or platform (notionally, CEV).