PROBLEMS AND PROMISES
Deborah Hix · 1990
The computer industry has seen an explosive emergence of user interface management system (UIMS) toolkits in the last few years. However, there are no standards for the components of such toolkits, and no procedure for systematically evaluating or comparing these toolkits. With their proliferation, ad hoc evaluations and comparisons are constantly being done, without a formal, structured approach. This paper will describe several of the problems involved in developing an evaluation procedure for UIMS, and will report on research that is showing promise as an evaluation procedure that produces quantifiable criteria for evaluation and comparing UIMS. Such a procedure could be used, for example, for choosing a UIMS for a particular human-computer interface development environment. The procedure we have developed generates ratings for two dimensions: • Functionality of the UIMS being evaluated, and • Usability of the UIMS being evaluated.