Cognitive engineering principles for enhancing human‐computer performance

Many computer systems today are not satisfactory to their users. Often the user interface does not receive the attention that it deserves, even though to the user, the interface is the most important part of the computer system. Further, many interfaces are not designed with reference to how humans process information. This research addressed this problem by designing and evaluating a cognitively engineered interface. Cognitive engineering of a human‐computer interface is the leveraging of empirical findings from the cognitive sciences and application of those findings to the design of the interface. It was hypothesized that a cognitively engineered interface is superior to interfaces that are not cognitively engineered. Ten cognitive‐design principles were extracted from the literature and explicitly applied to the design of an interface. Reaction time, accuracy, workload, and preference for this interface were experimentally determined and compared with that of two other interfaces. The other two interfaces were designed by separate teams for the same problem situation but were not, however, designed with explicit reference to the cognitive design principles. The cognitively engineered interface was found to be superior across all measurements. In fact, a postexperimental analysis also found a strong correlation between performance and the extent to which the 10 design principles were applied in each of the three interfaces. Therefore, based on the experimental results, I concluded that implementing a set of critical cognitive‐design principles will produce a “cognitively friendly” interface.

Portions of this research are contained in a book by Andriole and Adelman in 1995 entitled, Cognitive Systems Engineering for User‐Computer Interface Design, Prototyping, and Evaluation.