The Research On Usability Of The ICAID System For NCMT

As the follow-up research on the Tenth National Five-year Science and Technology Project, aiming at the ICAID (Internet-based Computer Aided Industrial Design) system that had been built, this thesis presents a methodology for evaluating the usability of the ICAID system, and also develops a structured usability evaluation framework. Moreover, based on the usability evaluation experiment, the thesis discusses the criteria of ICAID system.Usability is the core concept of human-computer interaction. At present, there are mainly two factors concerned with usability study. The first factor is the definition of usability also known as the connotation of usability, mostly related to how to distinguish usability dimensions of an object. The second one is the methods of usability evaluation, mostly related to what methods will be adopted and how to evaluate by using those methods. The contradictions between independent factors of evaluation object and universality of evaluation measurement is the main problem in the usability study field. In other words, there are likely some different dimensions and evaluation frameworks according to different evaluation objects.Based on the analysis on the characteristics of user interface of the ICAID system, the thesis presents the peculiar dimensions of ICAID system: Assistance, Efficiency, Innovation and Subjective Satisfaction dimension. After analyzing current usability evaluation methods and their application preconditions, the thesis presents a cross evaluation method integrating usability test and questionnaire. In order to evaluate the ICAID system with the usability criteria, the thesis suggests a subjective-objective evaluation method that can evaluate synthetically the usability through both objective behaviors and subjective satisfaction. Finally, by analyzing the errors and problems found in the process of the experiment, this thesis provides the suggestions of system optimizing and upgrade in the next step.