COGNITION-BASED DEVELOPMENT AND EVALUATION OF ERGONOMIC USER INTERFACES FOR MEDICAL IMAGE-PROCESSING AND ARCHIVING SYSTEMS

Whether or not a computerized system enhances the conditions of work i n the application domain, very much demands on the user interface. Gra phical user interfaces seem to attract the interest of the users but m ostly ignore some basic rules of visual information processing thus le ading to systems which are difficult to use, lowering productivity and increasing working stress (cognitive and work load). In this work we present some fundamental ergonomic considerations and their applicatio n to the medical image processing and archiving domain. We introduce t he extensions to an existing concept needed to control and guide the d evelopment of GUIs with respect to domain specific ergonomics. The sug gested concept, called Model-View-Controller Constraints (MVCC), can b e used to programmatically implement ergonomic constraints, and thus h as some advantages over written style guides. We conclude with the pre sentation of existing norms and methods to evaluate user interfaces.