How User Interfaces Can Improve DSSs: The Example of Visual Simulation Modelling

Abstract

Decision support systems (DSS) are reputedly very popular and increasingly in vogue. However, one might anticipate that their success depends on their interactivity with the user through the user interface component of the DSS. Whether or not this is currently successful or not one can only conjecture. But if we look at simulation modelling, a particular sort of DSS, especially pioneering work in visual interactive modelling, we might see how one can improve the user interface aspects of decision support systems. The nature of simulation systems is, as for any modelling process, to understand and structure a problem that is constantly changing to a varying degree, both with respect to changes in the outside world, and with respect to the perceptions of the problem owners. That change has to be apparent in the working system. The change in the system can be made visible through its user interface. A user of such a system can play a variety of scenarios and then watch the consequences of each change in the scenario being visually displayed. As the user watches the progress of the visual simulation it may become obvious that the performance could be improved by a small change to one of the variables. If the simulation system in use is built to aid a manager in decision making then the user interface of the system plays an important role in that process. The paper describes one such visual simulation system and argues that the main reason for its success is its user interface. Therefore one can postulate that decision support systems in general might be more readily acceptable to their potential customer base, the decision makers, if their user interface is built primarily to support the task of the decision making process. © 1995, Walter de Gruyter. All rights reserved.