Users as rational interacting agents: formalising assumptions about cognition and interaction

摘要

One way of assessing the usability of a computer system is to make reasonable assumptions about users' cognition and to analyse how they can be expected to work with the system, using their knowledge and information from the display to achieve their goals. This is the approach taken in Programmable User Modelling Analysis, a technique for predictive usability evaluation of interactive systems. The technique is based on the premise that an analyst can gain insights into the usability of a computer system by specifying the knowledge that a user needs to be able to use it and drawing inferences on how that knowledge wil guide the user's behaviour. This may be done by observing how a cognitive architecture, "programmed" with that knowledge, behaves. An alternative approach is to develop a formal description of the essential features of the cognitive architecture and to use that description to reason about likely user behaviour. In this paper, we present the approach and an outline formal description of the cognitive architecture.