Preference-Based Human Factors Knowledge Repository for Designing User Interfaces

This article proposes and describes a representational framework and a supporting tool environment for embedding and propagating human factors expertise into high level user interface design and development platforms. The proposed framework allows user interface designers to elicit, accommodate, and articulate user interface guidelines and results of experimental studies into reusable, evolutionary, and "living" design cases. The building blocks of the representational framework are a set of primitive constructs for consolidating the semantics of human factors knowledge into a design representation that characterizes the physical level of interaction. This is achieved through the development of a logical framework based on preference constraints and an initial set of preference and indifference expressions. The preference constraints provide a reasoning engine and a proof strategy for compiling a preference ordering of competing design alternatives and subsequently aggregating them into indifferent classe...