An interdisciplinary approach to human factors in telematic systems a review of the problems and possible solutions by a COST-11 ter working group

This contribution describes an interdisciplinary approach to the problem of applying psychological knowledge about the human end-user of an application system to the design of the user interface. To this end, relevant concepts from the domain of human factors from the domain of systems design had to be related to each other. Several description methods and representational languages had to be defined for the mental model and the conceptual model of the system on the one hand, and for the user interface and application interface on the other. The different representations had to be mapped onto those applied in the other domain. The resulting set of methods and tools enables an interdisciplinary team to describe the conceptual model of an existing application system, to define a user interface for this application that is acceptable from a human factors point of view, and to construct the actual interface in order to test whether this enables the user to interact with the system in a more comfortable way.