Metrics and Tools to Guide Design of Graphical User Interfaces

Abstract

User interface design metrics assist developers evaluate interface designs in early phase before delivering the software to end users. This dissertation presents a metric-based tool called GUIEvaluator for evaluating the complexity of the user interface based on its structure. The metrics-model consists of five modified structural measures of interface complexity: Alignment, grouping, size, density, and balance. The results of GUIEvaluator are discussed in comparison with the subjective evaluations of interface layouts and the existing complexity metrics-models. To extend this metrics-model, the Screen-Layout Cohesion (SLC) metric has been proposed. This metric is used to evaluate the usability of user interfaces. The SLC metric has been developed based on Aesthetic, structural, and semantic aspects of GUIs. To provide the SLC calculation, a complementary tool has been developed, which is called GUIExaminer. This dissertation demonstrates the potential of incorporating automated complexity and cohesion metrics into the user interface design process. The findings show that a strong positive correlation between the subjective evaluation and both the GUIEvaluator and GUIExaminer, at a significance level 0.05. Moreover, the findings provide evidence of the effectiveness of the GUIEvaluator and GUIExaminer to predict the best user interface design among a set of alternative user interfaces. In addition, the findings show that the GUIEvaluator and GUIExaminer can measure some usability aspects of a given user interface. However, the metrics validation proves the usefulness of GUIEvaluator and GUIExaminer for evaluating user interface designs.