Review by: Dreier, Matthias (2004-07-29)

Alistair G. Sutcliffe, a professor of Systems Engineering at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology, has been researching in the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) theory for many years. Most notable are his “domain theory“ and his contributions to the concept of “claims”. A claim is a design rationale that expresses the advantages and disadvantages of a design along with a detailed scenario. Claims are an interesting concept that goes beyond the notion of design patterns. Instead of simple instructions that tell you how to solve a design problem, claims support designers to deal with trade-offs. This publication illustrates how claims can support the reuse of common HCI knowledge in the design process.

The design process of user interfaces often requires trade-offs to meet the numerous demands of utility, cost effectiveness, and usability. Sutcliffe argues that design patterns are too specific to deal with this complexity. More promising concepts are likely to be derived from cognitive theory and other theoretical HCI knowledge, but these concepts often suffer from extensive complexity. He proposes claims as a concept that combines hands-on design patterns and theoretical cognitive models.

Claims encourage the designers to reason about trade-offs rather than applying a single design principle. The author illustrates the meta-data necessary to describe a claim, a classification of design tasks, and a possible user interface that hides much of the complexity of claims from the designers. Hence, he shows how claims of different levels – from low to rather abstract levels – might form a federation of claims. The concept of claims is illustrated by a case study of an information retrieval application.

Sutcliffe foresees two problems in the use of claims: creating generic claims and matching appropriate claims with the application context. In practice, however, the major problem is the lack of software tools that support the use of claims. Even if the concept of claims fails to establish a new design paradigm this publication is still worth reading because Sutcliffe shows that HCI knowledge can influence the design process not only in designing small user interface components such as buttons and menus, but also on a more abstract level. The article also provides an introduction to HCI theory and covers numerous cognitive models.