Towards ergonomic user interface composition: A study about information density criterion

Abstract

One way to design new interactive system is to automatically compose from existing systems. An interactive system encompasses a functional core (FC) and a user interface (UI). Many studies of the software engineering community focus on design or runtime composition of FC through components or services. However, provide good quality UI is important to make the composed system acceptable to the users. To address this need, the HCI community has studied how to compose UI at different levels of granularity. The main challenge is how to choose the best composition option in order to provide UI of good quality from the user point of view. This paper presents a step towards this challenge by proposing the chosen of the best composed graphical UI considering quality ergonomic criteria that can be automatically measured. In particular, it focuses on the information density criterion. Information density concerns the users' workload from a perceptual and cognitive point of view with regard to the whole set of information presented to the users rather than each individual element or item. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.