A Family of User Interface Consistency Checking Tools

Abstract

Incorporating evaluation metrics with GUI development tools will help designers create consistent interfaces in the future. Complexity in design of interfaces makes efficient evaluation impossible by a single consistency checking evaluation tool. Our f ocus is on developing a family of evaluation tools in order to make the evaluation process less cumbersome. We have developed a dialog box typeface and color table to facilitate detection of anomalies in color, font, font size, and font style. Concordance tools have been developed to spot variant capitalization and abbreviations globally in the interface and specifically in the button widgets. As buttons are frequently used widgets, a button layout table has been created to spot any inconsistencies in height, width and relative position between a given group of buttons if present. Finally, a terminology basket tool has been created to identify unwanted synonyms of computer related terms used in the interface which may be misleading to the end user. (Also cross-referenced as CAR-TR-770) (Also cross-referenced as ISR-TR-95-52)