Paper presented at NDISD'93 - HCI: Making Software Usable, Wolverhampton, 1993.
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Full reference:
A. Dix (1993).
Formal Methods in HCI: Moving Towards an Engineering Approach.
NDISD'93 - HCI: Making Software Usable, Wolverhampton.
http://alandix.com/academic/papers/wolvs93/
For related work see Alan's topics pages on formal methods in HCI and undo
The author and others have been studying the interplay of formal methods and HCI for several years. In particular, much of this work has centred on the design of formal models of interactive systems which can be used to formalise properties of usability. Although this work has been successful, it requires quite a high level of mathematical sophistication and is thus hard to 'give away' to the practitioner. This paper will describe two methods which have their roots in formal analysis, but which do not require great formal expertise. Such methods can be thought of as operating at an `engineering level' as they have to some extent pre-packaged the results and insights of more sophisticated analysis into a form more readily applied to practical problems.