GRAPHIC USER INTERFACE

Evaluating the potentially negative impact poorly designed call centre software might have in terms of GUI

ABSTRACT

The use of graphical user interfaces (GUIs) is entering into more and more modern software systems and is becoming a key issue affecting the user's impression of the overall quality of a system. The objectives of the research is to define poorly designed call centre software - the issues and the obstacles, identify the criteria for an effective call centre GUI, critically evaluate the role of minimal systems training for higher productivity levels, recommend web forms in a specific layout help improve the speed of processing information and intuitiveness of the GUI. The problem addressed by this study is to determine whether selected user interface design variations significantly affect the usability and solution quality of complex, multivariate discrete-event simulations. The basic inputs for GUI applications are events. When a GUI application is running, users' operations trigger events and the application responses to these events (typically via event handlers). Previous evaluations of fault localization techniques have primarily focused on the Siemens suite, a collection of small C programs. To the best of our knowledge, there has been no prior research on fault localization techniques that focuses particularly on GUI software except our own early work. Reducing fault localization effort by using effective techniques can greatly improve the test-diagnose-repair cycle. Until now, evaluations of performances of fault localization techniques have been applied primarily to conventional small software. However, more and more today's software users interact with the software through a graphical user interface (GUI), which is a representative of the broader class of event-driven software (EDS).

ABSTRACT2

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION5

1.1 Background of the Study5

1.2 Aims and Objectives6

1.3 Problem background7

1.4 Significance of the study7

1.5 Assumptions, Limitations, and Delimitations8

1.5.1 Assumptions8

1.5.2 Limitations8

1.5.3 Delimitations9

CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW10

2.1. GUI component and event10

2.2. GUI test case and oracle12

2.3. GUI's hierarchy and the graph model and coverage criteria for GUI software13

2.4. Fault localization algorithm14

2.5 User Interface and Visual Elements16

2.6 Fault localization technique18

2.6.1 Slice-based techniques18

2.6.2. Program spectrum-based techniques19

2.6.3. Predicate-based statistical techniques21

2.6.4. Program state-based techniques21

2.6.5. Other techniques22

CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY25

3.1 Research questions25

3.2 Subject programs and test cases26

3.3 Experimental design28

CHAPTER 4: RESULT AND DISCUSSION31

4.1 Component Types31

4.2 General Design Recommendations for Applications and Services35

4.3 Designing Presentation Layers37

4.4. Designing User Interface Components38

4.5 User Interface Component Functionality39

4.6 Windows Desktop User Interfaces42

4.7 The role of minimal systems training for higher productivity levels45

4.8 Design Aims For Graphics & Direct Manipulation48

4.9 Appearance and Composition49

4.10. Threats to validity53

CHAPTER 5: CONLUSION AND FUTURE WORK57

APPENDIX59

PROJECT OVERVIEW REPORT59

References64

Appendices73



CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION

1.1 Background of the Study

The use of graphical user interfaces (GUIs) is entering into more and more modern software systems and is becoming a key issue affecting the user's impression of the overall quality of a system. As a critical achievement of modern software development, GUIs provide people with a convenient and flexible way of operating software systems by displaying rich information on the screen and enabling the users to either use mouse or keyboard to accomplish the interaction between them and software systems (Zhang, ...