Modellbasierte Analyse von Nutzerschnittstellen

Electronic devices are constantly becoming more powerful and therefore more capable of providing a variety of different features. At the same time their size is being reduced, also constantly, by the manufacturers. This development has a considerable impact on the user interface of such devices. The high number of functions that have to be controlled, the limited size of the display, as well as the limited set of possible haptic commands require new user-interface concepts. Today’s interactive devices are therefore complex: They are multimodal and multifunctional, they filter the displayed information and assign actions to the user’s commands according to the situation. Additionally with respect to user characteristics a heterogeneous user-group is constituted which makes a considerable amount of quality-requirement demands on an interactive device. In particular the quality attribute “usability” plays a significant role. Due to the high complexity of the devices, however, current evaluation methods encounter their limits. In this thesis, a method of analysis is developed that describes human-machine systems by means of discrete mathematical models. The models are notated by a hierarchical automaton-based description technique. The main focus lies on the structured description of the interaction behaviour and not on the graphical design of the user interface. The key concepts for the description of menu-driven user interfaces are combined within a conceptual model and integrated into the automaton-based description technique. Significantly, the properties of the models that influence the quality attribute “usability” are identified and formalized by means of temporal logic. With the aid of model checking the conformity of the models to these properties is automatically verified. The practical applicability of the developed method is shown by means of an extensive case study from the automotive field.