Design of Interactive Systems - A Formal Approach

Decision Support Systems (DSSs) are utilized to support a users decision process. One generally required characteristic of a DSS is that it be an interactive system. Generally the degree of interaction between the human and the system is such that one can view the information processing activity as being performed by the human-computer information processor. Although DSSs are fairly commonly used, there has been very little work done to develop a formal basis for the design of such systems which take into account the interactive nature of problem solving. In this paper we propose a formal model for analysing the human-machine information processor. The model takes into account cost of performing information-gathering actions, communication costs and time constraints. We illustrate the application of the mode1 within the domain of categorization. A special case of the categorization problem called the “only-correct-guesses-count” problem is defined and analyzed within the context of the model.