An Evaluation of Human-Product Interface Usability

인간-제품 인터페이스의 사용성 평가

As the gap between competing products narrows in terms of performance and quality, the product usability is rapidly becoming a new dimension of product design as the key to offering distinctive value to the customer. Because the user interface is important, not only for the user but also for the efficiency of te whole organiation, system designers require increasingly precise evaluation methods to determine how effective and usable human-product interface is. In this study a new methodology named usability analysis diagram(UAD), for evaluating usability of human-product interface systematically, was developed. UAD is a top-down flow diaagram of a human-product interaction, in ehichfour basic elements - perception, understanding, intellectual decision and action - were classified and then represented by a particular symbol for each. The usability of the product is assessed by the frequency of each symbol in a diagram which represents a sequence of cognitive and physical activities of users during the use of the product, and by the level of difficulty that is classif- ied in three levels in terms of easiness of perception, understanding and action. In order to test validity of the proposed UAD in a real situation, a case study was performed on two different cameras, automatic and manual, and their usability was successfully evaluated and compared.