A Usability Study of End-User Construction of Direct Manipulation User
Interfaces
- T. Paul McCartney
This paper describes an empirical study of end-users that tested the
usability of
The Programmers' Playground
graphical environment. The Programmers' Playground is a software library and run-time system for
constructing distributed multimedia applications. Playground's
graphical environment
enables end-users to create direct manipulation
graphical user interfaces (GUIs) and to dynamically configure
communication among distributed application components. In this
study, 28 end-users with no prior experience in distributed computing
or user interface construction were timed and evaluated on several
tasks using our graphical environment. Tasks included the use of
direct and indirect constraint relationships, visual configuration of
distributed applications, and graphical user interface construction.
The results show that a wide variety of end-users (i.e., not just
programmers) can learn and apply these concepts, utilizing our
graphical environment to construct distributed multimedia
applications.
KEYWORDS: constraints, direct manipulation, graphical user interfaces,
interactive techniques, usability study, user interface management system
Technical report version is available as
postscript (.ps) or
compressed postscript (.ps.Z).
Software - Concepts and Tools, 18(2):63-72, June 1997.
Washington University Department of Computer Science WUCS-96-26, October 1996.
Prepared by
T. Paul McCartney
(paul@cs.wustl.edu)
Washington University Department of Computer Science