Over the last decade, interactive devices such as mobile phones have become complicated drastically mainly because of feature creep, the tendency for the number of features in a product to rise with each release of the product. One of the ways to redu...
Over the last decade, interactive devices such as mobile phones have become complicated drastically mainly because of feature creep, the tendency for the number of features in a product to rise with each release of the product. One of the ways to reduce the complexity of a multi-functional device is to design it consistently. Although the definition of consistency is elusive and it is sometimes beneficial to be inconsistent, in general, consistently designed systems are easier to learn, easier to remember, and causing less errors. In practice, however, it is often not easy to design the user interaction or interface of a multi-functional device consistently. Since the interaction design of a multi-functional device should deal with a large number of design variables and relations among them, solving this problem might be very time-consuming and error-prone. Therefore, there is a strong need for a well-developed methodology that supports the complex design process. This study has developed an effective and efficient methodology, called CUID (Consistent Design of User Interaction), which focuses on logical consistency rather than physical or visual consistency. CUID deals with three main problems in interaction design: procedure design for each task, decisions of available operations(or functions) for each system state, and the mapping of available operations(functions) and interface controls. It includes a process for interaction design and a software tool for supporting the process. This paper also demonstrates how CUID supports the consistent design of user interaction by presenting a case study. It shows that the logical inconsistencies of a multi-functional device can be resolved by using the CUID methodology.