User‐interface design heuristics for developing usable industrial hypermedia applications

Shop floor operators urgently need help to cope with the pressures of the present manufacturing context. One proposed solution is industrial hypermedia applications (IHA). A review of published papers on IHAs has shown that while the potential benefits of such applications, if accepted and used by operators, are well documented, user-interface design aspects are not. In other words, the rationale used for the user-interface design is not explained. This article fills the gap by drawing on human–computer interaction and hypermedia literature to present user-interface design guidelines or heuristics. The latter were incorporated in 2 IHAs developed for this study. Shop floor operators empirically assessed the IHAs through usability trials held in the workplace and provided data on their perceptions of the IHA's ease of use. The findings show that the 7 design heuristics contributed to the usability of the IHAs. However, developers should not apply the design heuristics in isolation but should also elicit user characteristics and task domain. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

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