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)