An information theory-based approach for quantitative evaluation of user interface complexity

Development of effective measures for the complexity of human-computer interface design based on a proper model is desirable in order to improve the human performance and to facilitate the system development. In this paper, the authors propose the task-to-action (TTA) model which can describe the task-performing procedure of human operators. Quantitative interface design complexity measures using an informational entropy concept are also proposed to determine the user interface complexity, i.e., operation complexity, transition complexity, and screen complexity. Two experiments are performed in this work to show the validity of the proposed model and the measures: one is to test the validity of the TTA model with the case of information-seeking problem and the other for the suggested entropy measures