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Reasoning about order errors in interaction
Reliability of an interactive system depends on users as well as the device implementation. User errors can result in catastrophic system
failure. However, work from the field of cognitive science shows that
systems can be designed so as to completely eliminate whole classes of
user errors. This means that user errors should also fall within the remit
of verification methods. In this paper we demonstrate how the HOL
theorem prover [7] can be used to detect and prove the absence of the
family of errors known as order errors. This is done by taking account
of the goals and knowledge of users. We provide an explicit generic user
model which embodies theory from the cognitive sciences about the way
people are known to act. The user model describes action based on user
communication goals. These are goals that a user adopts based on their
knowledge of the task they must perform to achieve their goals. We use
a simple example of a vending machine to demonstrate the approach.
We prove that a user does achieve their goal for a particular design of
machine. In doing so we demonstrate that communication goal based
errors cannot occur
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