A Scenario Based Claims Analysis

As a project in the context of a Human Computer Interaction course, it was suggested to use a "Scenario based analysis" approach. All the evaluation part of our project is based on this approach.

A "Scenario based claims analysis" consists of scenarios followed by a claims analysis:

• The scenario describes the successions of actions and reactions of a user with a specific goal who interacts with a system. The review of these actions and perceptions is a process through which the identification of the designer with the user is simplified . The designer becomes consequently more likely to perceive to what extent his design serves the user's goal.

• He can then establish a list of the advantages and disadvantages of claims suggested by the scenarios.

The grounds of the claims may be reinforced using other HCI materials. Here is a list of some of them:

• GOMS

The purpose of the GOMS model is to show some temporal properties of a task in order to be able to compare the "speed "of different designs.

• TAGS

This model focuses on the general consistency of the whole system which may intervene in learning how to use it.

• Metaphors

People are thought to learn mostly by making analogies. A metaphor analysis show to what extent an analogy is relevant and simplifies the learning of a new system.

• Direct Manipulation

This last model stresses the importance of giving the feeling to manipulate directly objects that are considered usually complex to manipulate in the real world (bridges, statistics, etc...).

In our evaluation we tried to use these theories wherever applicable. However GOMS  was inappropriate to this analysis:  there is no way of predicting the options chosen by an expert user (required by this kind of analysis) to access a page for instance (he can use a bookmark, type directly the url, etc...).

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