User-Centered Design and Evaluation of Virtual Environments

he ever-increasing power of computers and hardware rendering systems enables the creation of visually rich and perceptually realistic virtual environment (VE) applications. At the same time, comparatively little effort has gone into the user interaction components of VEs. Although usability engineering is a newly emerging facet of VE development, user-centered design and evaluation in VEs as a practice still lags far behind what's needed. In this article we present a structured, iterative methodology for user-centered design and evaluation of VE user interaction. Figure 1 (next page) illustrates our basic technique. We recommend performing (1) user task analysis followed by (2) expert guidelines-based evaluation, (3) formative user-centered evaluation , and finally (4) summative comparative evaluation. In this article we first give some motivation and background for our methodology, then we describe each technique in some detail. We applied these techniques to a real-world battlefield visualization VE, as explained. Finally, we evaluate why this approach provides a cost-effective strategy for assessing and iteratively improving user interaction in VEs.