Abstract
Despite the importance of software interfaces, trade-offs must be made during development. Value Focused Thinking (VFT) provides an objective methodology that is well suited for handling multi-objective problems such as interface design issues. Facilitated sessions are held with the intended users to elicit what is of importance to the user. These values are characterized and put to a common scale, allowing measurement of their contribution to the overall objective. The resulting hierarchy can be used to guide software development or compare different interface solutions. In this study, a VFT hierarchy was developed with military intelligence analysts to identify what values were desired in an interface for software intended to address a facet of data overload. The prototype interface was evaluated against the hierarchy with these stated values. The process and the hierarchy itself provided insight on where resources should be expended to provide the greatest benefit in the final product.
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