Cognitive engineering principles for enhancing human-computer performance

Abstract

Many computer systems today are not satisfactory to their users. Often the user interface does not receive the attention that it deserves, even though to the user, the interface is the most important part of the computer system. Further, many interfaces are not designed with reference to how humans process information. This research addressed this problem by designing and evaluating a cognitively engineered interface. Cognitive engineering of a human‐computer interface is the leveraging of empirical findings from the cognitive sciences and application of those findings to the design of the interface. It was hypothesized that a cognitively engineered interface is superior to interfaces that are not cognitively engineered. Ten cognitive‐design principles were extracted from the literature and explicitly applied to the design of an interface. Reaction time, accuracy, workload, and preference for this interface were experimentally determined and compared with that of two other interfaces. The other two interf...