An Approach To Perceptual-Control-Based Scenario Design For User Interface

The development of pervasive computing environment promoted the applications,which combined computer and every work of life into every corner of our lives. Today's users are not just office professionals but naive people who have needs of their own for using the computer. As the platform between users and the system, the design of user interface directly affects users understanding and operating the system. At present, the usability of the user interface emphasizes on providing the right "Look-and-Feel". Although the user interface which meet the needs of this usability can successfully model the function of the system, it can't solve the problem of semantic usability.At precent, user interface not only achieve functional modeling, but also focus on providing a platform, which is for common user with less domain knowledge to understand, learn and use. In this paper, this kind of usability is called pervasive usability, it is a complement to the traditional usability on the semantic level. Thus, traditional design of user interface which process-oriented is no longer able to meet the folks'demand of the usability for the pervasive computing. From this viewpoint, this paper aims to research and develop a new approach, which can model the pervasive usability on user interface.In this paper, the approach to design user interface is called perceptual-control-based scenario design, which aims to meet pervasive usability. In psychological research, perceptual control theory believes that all behaviors involve control. It emphasizes designers should consider what information users want to see and control, rather than consider what action users need to execute. Therefore, this approach of task analyzing mainly focus on the transfer of system state, not the operation sequence of executiving. Scenario-based design could provide a flexible environment to designers, and help them to manage the changing of state caused by uncertain environment. At the same time, it can improve the communication between designers and users, and help the designers to model the user's task on the intent level. This paper combined the two aspects together, and propose an engineering approach for user interface design which can meet the pervasive usability. The main point of the approach is to derive the objects that are significant for the user understanding and controlling the system, and the means for the control, from the analysis of scenarios. The result gained from the process will be used for the re-design of scenarios, the purpose of which is to satisfy the user's needs. In order to verify the effectiveness and practicality of the approach discussed above, an air tickets system is designed. A necessary assessment of the system is also made in here.The research of this paper was supported by Shaanxi Provincial Department of Education Special Research Program(No.2010JK850), the National Natural Science Foundation of China under grant (No.60873095), and the Science Research Laboratory Foundation of Graduate Student, Northwest University (No.09YSY30).