COMPARING TELEPHONE-COMPUTER INTERFACE DESIGNS - ARE SOFTWARE SIMULATIONS AS GOOD AS HARDWARE PROTOTYPES

Widespread interest in the evaluation of human-system interfaces has l ed to the development of various techniques in usability engineering. Usability evaluations are usually carried out on interface prototypes. However, if the design involves hardware implementation, such as a sp ecial keypad or a control panel layout, producing hardware prototypes for evaluation can be expensive and time-consuming. One solution to th is problem is to use software tools for design simulation. In this cas e, a question which must be answered is: will a simulated prototype pr oduce the same conclusions as a hardware prototype? That is, is softwa re simulation a valid approach? The main purpose of this paper is to a ddress this issue through an experiment. A multimedia authoring packag e was used to simulate several potential telephone handset designs for telephone-computer interfaces. The simulated prototypes were tested a nd compared with a physical keyboard for validation. The experiment di d confirm the validity of simulation in this particular setting. It al so demonstrated the advantages of using a software tool to build the p rototype and to automate the evaluation process, including user traini ng, test setting, and data collection.