Abstract: The goal of this research was to empirically evaluate the usefulness of an interactive environment for developing human-computer interfaces. In particular, it focused on a set of interactive tools, called the Author's Interactive Dialogue Environment (AIDE), for human-computer interface implementation. AIDE is used by an interface design specialist, called a dialogue author, to implement an interface by directly manipulating and defining its objects, rather than by the traditional method of writing source code. In a controlled experiment, a group of dialogue author subjects used AIDE 1.0 to implement a predefined interface, and a group of application programmer subjects implemented the identical interface using programming code. Dialogue author subjects performed the task more than three times faster than the application programmer subjects. This study empirically supports, possibly for the first time, the long-standing claim that interactive tools for interface development can improve productivity and reduce frustration in developing interfaces over traditional programming techniques for interface development.

Keywords: Complex systems; Empirical studies; Implementation; Prototyping; Software development; Tools

Originally published: Proceedings of the Human Factors Society 30th Annual Meeting, 1986, pp. 1349-1353

Republished: G. Perlman, G. K. Green, & M. S. Wogalter (Eds.) Human Factors Perspectives on Human-Computer Interaction: Selections from Proceedings of Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meetings, 1983-1994, Santa Monica, CA: HFES, 1995, pp. 65-69.