An Empirical Verification of the Foundations of Structured User Interface Design SUID

This paper is a report on the research being conducted at the Universidad Rafael Landívar of Guatemala on the development of a design methodology for user interfaces and interactive systems in general. At this stage of the research we tried to test the methodology's fundamental supposition: that every information system is devoted to handle a certain set of objects from the real world and that based on the proper identification of that set, the interface can be designed in a layered fashion producing ten different layers, specified in the methodology. Several user interfaces were picked and through a reverse-engineering process, the main set of objects was identified and the ten layers described for each one. The results revealed positive features of the methodology as well as nuisances, and, at the same time constitute the first empirical verification of the underlying suppositions.