Using designer´s effort for user interface evaluation

Designing Human Computer Interfaces is one of the more important and difficult design tasks. The tools for verifying the quality of the interface are frequently expensive or provide feedback too far after the design of the interface as to make it meaningless. To improve the interface usability, designers need a verification tool providing immediate feedback at a low cost. Using an effort-based measure of usability, it is possible for a designer to estimate the effort a subject might expend to complete a specific task. In this paper, we develop the notion of designer´s effort for evaluating interface usability for new designs and Commercial-Off-The-Shelf software. Designer´s effort provides a technique to evaluate human interface before completing the development of the software and provides feedback from usability tests conducted using the effort-based evaluation technique.