Skip to content
University of Maryland LibrariesDigital Repository at the University of Maryland
    • Login
    View Item 
    •   DRUM
    • A. James Clark School of Engineering
    • Institute for Systems Research Technical Reports
    • View Item
    •   DRUM
    • A. James Clark School of Engineering
    • Institute for Systems Research Technical Reports
    • View Item
    JavaScript is disabled for your browser. Some features of this site may not work without it.

    A Family of User Interface Consistency Checking Tools

    Thumbnail
    View/Open
    MS_96-5.pdf (4.002Mb)
    No. of downloads: 882

    Date
    1996
    Author
    Mahajan, Rohit
    Advisor
    Shneiderman, B.
    Metadata
    Show full item record
    Abstract
    Designing a user interface with a consistent visual design and textual properties with current generation GUI development tools is cumbersome. SHERLOCK, a family of consistency checking tools, has been designed to evaluate visual design and textual properties of interface, make the GUI evaluation process less arduous, and aid usability testing. SHERLOCK includes a dialog box summary table to provide a compact overview of visual properties of hundreds of dialog boxes of the interface. Terminology specific tools, like Interface Concordance, Terminology Baskets and Interface Speller have been developed. Button specific tools including Button Concordance and Button Layout Table have been created to detect variant capitalization, distinct typefaces, distinct colors, variant button sizes and inconsistent button placements. This thesis describes software architecture, data structures and the use of SHERLOCK. An experiment with 60 subject to study the effects of inconsistent interface terminology on user's performance showed 10-25% speedup for consistent interfaces. SHERLOCK was tested with four commercial prototypes; the corresponding outputs, analysis and feedback from designers of these applications is presented.
    URI
    http://hdl.handle.net/1903/5800
    Collections
    • Institute for Systems Research Technical Reports

    DRUM is brought to you by the University of Maryland Libraries
    University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742-7011 (301)314-1328.
    Please send us your comments.
    Web Accessibility
     

     

    Browse

    All of DRUMCommunities & CollectionsBy Issue DateAuthorsTitlesSubjectsThis CollectionBy Issue DateAuthorsTitlesSubjects

    My Account

    LoginRegister
    Pages
    About DRUMAbout Download Statistics

    DRUM is brought to you by the University of Maryland Libraries
    University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742-7011 (301)314-1328.
    Please send us your comments.
    Web Accessibility