User Interface Service Software Developerís Guide - Hitech Projects

January 2008
Public
Figure 10: Conciseness of the menu structures
To backup this qualitative results we also done some quantitative experiments where the
execution time for the various experiments were measured and compared. In general, the
results show that people are getting faster when they become used to a user interface.
However, the results also showed that usage speed or efficiency is not the major criteria to
rate a specific menu structure.
3.10.3 System Performance
Our experiences show that adding devices is a time consuming task as the knowledge base
has to be updated in order to take the environmental changes into account. Thereafter, the
menu structures for the various user are synthesized off-line.
The advantage of this approach is that the actual interaction of user and system is not subject
to any significant delays as all menu structures and navigation options have been generated
already off-line. However, the system may suffer from delay that is caused by the actual
services and devices that are controlled by the UI. I.e., the overall performance of the system
is significantly affected by the performance of the devices and services that are operated by
the user via the UI. Hence, a general statement about the overall performance of the GUI
cannot be made without taking the actual devices and services into account.
Nevertheless, when neglecting any delay caused by the controlled devices and services, it can
be stated that the GUI shows a sufficient performance when executed on a typical office PC. A
more detailed analysis is now ongoing. However, results cannot be published yet.
Amigo IST-2004-004182 113/114