The Economics Of Interface Development

This paper argues that decision theory can be used to identify different attitudes towards `usability engineering'. The advocates of formal methods and ethnomethodology argue that initial investments offer substantial benefits to subsequent development. For other groups, high cost techniques are seen to offer few rewards for interface design. The following pages exploit utility curves to represent these different perspectives. The intention is not to map out all of the complex factors that affect human decision making but to focus on the interaction between issues of cost and probability in commercial project management. Decision theory provides analytical techniques that can be applied to the resulting models. In particular, risk preference coefficients are used to explain part of the reluctance to exploit `advanced' design techniques for human computer interfaces. Later sections exploit the utility curves to identify an agenda for future research in human computer interaction