SOFTWARE TESTING, VERIFICATION AND RELIABILITY, VOL.
4, 51-53 (1994)
Book Reviews
USERINTERFACE SOFTWARE.Len Bass and Pra-
sun Dewan (eds). Published by John Wiley
and Sons Ltd., Chichester, U.K., 1993. ISBN
0 471 93784 3, 201 pages. Price: f19.95, Soft
Cover.
This collection of articles is part of Wiley’s
Trends in Software series and, as such, attempts
to provide a comprehensive, state-of-the-art set
of papers on a single topic: in this case, user
interface software.
Considering that anything to do with ‘the user’
cannot be a unified, discrete field of study, this
is a very unified presentation. The collection
begins with an article by H k and Hartson on
formative evaluation which, together with their
copious footnotes, provides an excellent intro-
duction to analytical and empirical issues in inter-
face evaluation before, during, and after inter-
face design. Len Bass’s following article presents
various system influences on the architecture of
interactive systems which leads into two detailed
design articles: Mark Linton and the Interview
toolkit, and Gansner and Reppy’s multi-threaded
eXene user interface toolkit. Next, John Stasko
speculates on why animation has not been used
more in interfaces and then discusses various
design goals that can be accomplished with ani-
mation. Virtual Reality is examined by Chris
Espisito in terms of difficulties, architecture and
implementation issues. Then ‘a scheme for ana-
lysing the functionality of synchronous group-
ware’ is proposed by Olson et al., which leads
into Prasun Dewan’s description of the main con-
cepts behind a variety of multiuser applications
such as databases, distributed systems, message
servers, shared object systems, toolkits, etc. In
the final article, Scott Stevens discusses multime-
dia computing: applications, designs, and human
factors.
If there are any areas of weakness, I would
say they are sound and speech interfaces and,
maybe, adaptive interfaces for the handicapped.
This collection would be useful for upper
undergraduate education, a beginning survey
course in graduate software design, or for any
~~ ~ ~
@ 1994 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
practising professional who wants a snapshot of
most of the major user interface issues in 1993.
On a bookshelf, this book would sit comfortably
between User Centered System Design by Nor-
man and Draper (1986) and Designing Interac-
tion by Carroll (1991).
References
Carroll, J. M. (ed.) (1991) Designing Interaction:
Psychology at the Human-Computer Intetjke,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, U.K.
Norman, D. A. and Draper S. W. (eds) (1986)
User Centered System Design: New Perspec-
tives on Human-Computer Interaction, L.
Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, New Jersey,
U.S.A.
THOM GILLESPIE
School of Libraries and Information Studies
Indiana University
Bloomington,
IN 47406, U.S.A.
DEVELOPING USER INTERFACES:ENSURING
USABILlTY THROUGH PRODUCT AND PROCESS,
Deborah Hix and H. Rex Hartson. Published
by John Wiley and Sons, New York, U.S.A.,
1993. ISBN 0 471 57813 4, 381 pages. Price:
f27.95 (U.K.), $49.95 (U.S.A.), Soft Cover.
Usability and fitness-for-use are becoming
increasingly important, and many design teams
are including usability professionals on their
staff. However, there is a great deal of current
research into the best way for the usability
specialist to be integrated into a structured design
environment. One problem is determining the
best methods to document and communicate the
user interface design in a non-ambiguous man-
52
ner. Many times I have explained an interface
to a colleague by using a combination of draw-
ings, text, and hand gestures, and have left think-
ing that I had expressed myself well, only to
find that some key piece of the interface was
misinterpreted. Also,during verification the lack
of a common notation to describe the interaction
between the user and application makes the veri-
fication process more difficult to manage.
Deborah Hix and H. Rex Hartson have for
some time been promoting the idea of a common
notation that can be used by a usability pro-
fessional to communicate user behaviour and
feedback to the implementor of a user interface.
This method, called ‘user action notation’
(UAN),breaks the different components of user
behaviour and feedback into a structured
notation that can be interpreted in a non-ambigu-
ous way by anyone who understands the UAN
syntax. The present book shows the UAN fitting
into their view of the ideal development project.
As an example project they include, by way of
exercises, the development of a calendar man-
agement system.
The authors seem to be aiming for quite a
wide target audience with this book, offering an
overview of many areas that may be new ground
for those not completely familiar with human
factors. The text is written in a style that will be
accessible to anyone interested in the develop-
ment of user interfaces.
The book is divided into two major sections,
‘The Product’ and ‘The Process’. The text begins
with a short chapter on usability, and an intro-
duction to the authors’ views on how the work
of designing and developing a user interface
should be partitioned, namely into behavioural
and constructional domains. The behavioural
domain is the user’s view of the interface, while
the constructional domain is the view of the
software developer. The majority of the text con-
centrates on the behavioural domaid, with the
exception of one chapter that focuses on develop
ment tools.
The first major section, ‘The Product’, is a
summary of the components that make up the
human interface mmponents of a system, as well
as a discussion of style guides, guidelines, and
standards. Readers familiar with these issues will
probably tend to skip these chapters, as the
material here seems to be included primarily for
those readers with little human-factors experi-
ence. The authors do a g o d job of compressing
this information into only two chapters, however,
and include an excellent reference section to
other sources for detailed information, if in-
depth study of these issues is desired.
BOOK REVIEWS
The second section, ‘The Process’, deals with
introducing UAN, and integrating it with the
development of the user interface and the rest
of the project. This is the main focus of the
book, and this section is treated in much greater
detail than the first. The section starts with a
description of the activities that make up the
development of the interface and non-interface
parts of an interactive system. The authors make
a good case for development as an iterative pro-
cess, making use of prototypes and user-evalu-
tion, especially concerning the user interface.
The need for effective communication between
the user interaction developers, working in what
the authors term the ‘behavioural domain’, and
the implementors of the interface, working in the
‘constructional domain’, is portrayed accurately
and convincingly.
The calendar management system is also intro-
duced in the second section to help put the ideas
introduced in the text into practice. The sample
application is helpful, as the text did a good job
of bringing up the sorts of issues that arise when
designing an interface. The authors suggest that
group participation by a development team is a
useful way of learning their process. This section
would serve as a lightweight introduction project
for any teams that are considering introducing
this notation, prior to using it on a ‘real-world’
project.
The UAN itself is introduced slowly, with
many exercises included to aid in understanding.
When followed in a group setting, these sections
could be expanded to cover scenarios that match
the needs of the team. The UAN syntax can be
verbose at lower-levels of interaction description,
but the authors give several helpful methods for
structuring the abstraction levels to make the
notation easier to read. Those familiar with reg-
ular expressions should find themselves becom-
ing very proficient in reading UAN by the end
of the example project.
Information on formative evaluation tech-
niques is also included. These are particularly
helpful, as the biggest problem when using an
iterative design method, as put forth in this book,
is guaranteeing that sooner or later a product
will emerge that meets the customer’s needs.
Their rapid prototyping methods, as well as the
methods for tracking any usability improvements
that occur between iterations, can help show that
the team is converging on the development goal.
Development teams looking for ways to docu-
ment and improve their user-interface design will
find a great deal of useful information in this
book. Those that are new to the field will prob-
ably want to seek out more background infor-
BOOK REVIEWS 53

mation in regard to human factors and interface

styles, but this book is one of very few that
attempt to integrate human factor design into a MIKEY WILLIAMS
structured development environment, and it has Ericsson Business Communications
been done quite well, and in a style that should 5757 Plaza Drive
appeal to a wide audience. Cypress, C A 90630-0007,U.S. A .