Design differentiation strategies are becoming important not only in determining when customers buy products, but also in performance. However, it's not easy to decide whether the products are good or not from performance and design differentiation st...
Design differentiation strategies are becoming important not only in determining when customers buy products, but also in performance. However, it's not easy to decide whether the products are good or not from performance and design differentiation strategies. In particular, there are several methodologies to evaluate display designs based on GUI. Even so, studies on decision-making methods that can make the best choice using multiple standards for a number of alternatives isn't enough. It seems that it is possible for decision-makers to effectively find solutions providing quantitative components derived from intuitive and reasonable or unreasonable judgments.
GUI was developed through much trial and error, not by sudden inspiration. There were many trials and errors in the GUI design process and through this it was improved. The principles for new designs also have been built up. Design principles are applied to principles for evaluation, because quality evaluation standards are in accordance with the design principles. However, the common measures and units for design principles in GUI are not only clear, but also difficult to digitize because of their dependence on evaluators' subjectivity and sensibility. Besides, design evaluation on GUI has performed according to a few specialists' subjective judgments, but it doesn't seem that most evaluators are likely to consider the goal and needs about design targets. Therefore, we would need more objective and systematic methods for specialists to evaluate design alternatives.
This study suggests a way to more systematically evaluate and select the evaluation methods for display design based on GUI. In conclusion, this study introduced the AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process), comparing and analyzing advantages and disadvantages among several decision-making methods.
First of all, this study emphasizes the importance of GUI, for example, GUI design principles, components and processes. Also, 20 evaluation principles are selected from doubled-term elimination, similar-term combination, and inappropriate-term elimination after collecting the most developed principles to date. Then the last 9 evaluation principles are selected through MDS (multi-dimension scaling) that the 20 principles are grouped by similarity again. This process is for more quantitative data calculated weight using the AHP.
In addition, this study introduced how to evaluate display designs on Navigations using the AHP as a case study to prove the appropriateness of this method.
This case study was conducted by a questionnaire that consists of the last 9 evaluation principles of professional designers.
As a result, only 31 samples' data had sufficient consistency for valid analysis. Geometrical and arithmetical averages were all used to analyze it in order to show the differentiation of effective importance. There were divergent results, and this study finally used the arithmetical average maintaining the reciprocal of the matrix.
The case study for Navigation proved that it is useful to know the quantitative figures for each principle. Finedrive M720DB was selected as the best model from those figures.
Conclusively, this study suggested an evaluation process composed of display design evaluation principles based on GUI using the AHP, the most appropriate decision-making method. Also, it selects the best alternative from among the choices reasonably and systematically.