Preface
The Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) is an active area of research, with a notorious interdisciplinary subject, that relates Computer Science with many other fields of study and research.
Interaction between users and computers takes part in the User Interface (UI), which includes both software and hardware.
From a general point of view, the UI is all about user experience and computer working environment, such as organization, training or help.
Why it is so important to study the UI? Because it is the responsible of the sucess of an interactive application.
Therefore, this work will try to help in studying the usability of any interface existing between users and computers in the new information spaces: the World Wide Web.
HCI disciplines. Image by Luis Leiva.
In order to study the human being role in the design of interactive systems, in addition to the computer aspect, it is necessary to consider other disciplines. It is necessary to study the psicological aspects of the user, equipment ergonomics, social aspects, design subjects and a long etcetera that requires something else than good programming knowledges.
The HCI basis to carry out this work are focused in: 1) to understand the psicological, ergonomic, organizational and social factors which determine how people works and makes use of computers; and transfer this understanding to 2) develop tools and technologies that help designers to achieve better computer systems according to the desired activities; in order to 3) obtain an efficient, effective and satisfactory interaction both for individuals and user groups.
In sum, one needs to focus in the evaluation of web interfaces in order to assess the design of new interactive systems. Such an evaluation should be performed via a User-Centered Design (UCD) approach, and the application we propose here can be of great help for this task.
