Abstract

Website has become a major media for exchanging information because of its tremendous speed and easy access. Even a single website may contain tens of thousands of web pages nowadays. A website with tons of information, as an interface, should be designed well enough to ensure users to access appropriate information easily and quickly. This thesis describes a novel website interface design approach to achieve the aforementioned goal. Several ideas are behind the development of this approach. First, a website interface design is based on a general interface design model to the dynamic system. The model is based on a set of core notions: function, behavior, and structure. Second, this general interface design model is modified to suit the website interface design based on our observation of the difference between the website and the dynamic system. Third , the interface design axiom, i.e., the mental model should be equal to the design model is elaborated in the context of the developing the new approach. Last, the UML is used to represent the interface which is designed based on the new approach. The new approach is validated based on an experimental study. Two interfaces are developed based on the new approach and a popular approach in the literature, respectively. The participants operate on the two interfaces, and their performance and mental workload are used to derive conclusions. Both experiment and data are statistically processed. The experimental results allow us to conclude that the new approach is very promising to the website interface design.