A Hybrid Approach for Modelling Early Prototype Evaluation Under User-Centred Design Through Association Rules

Abstract

One of the main activities in User Centred Design (UCD) is prototype evaluation, which is traditionally performed by means of an Evaluation Stage that looks for the redefinition of the prototype requirements, involving quantitative and qualitative usability testing techniques. This paper describes a new approach in which the traditional methodology for performing the Evaluation Stage under UCD is embedded in a framework with capabilities for mining association rules. This allows to minimise the impact of the interpretation bias of the evaluation team when analysing ambiguous user statements in natural language.

This work was partially supported by Cicyt Project ADACO (TIN2004-08000-C03-03), and Project SGR-00881 (Generalitat de Catalunya, Spain).