Performance Evaluation of Interactive Systems with Interactive Cooperative Objects Models

Arguments to support validity of most contributions in the field of human–computer interaction are based on detailed results of empirical studies involving cohorts of tested users confronted with a set of tasks performed on a prototype version of an interactive system. This chapter presents how the Interactive Cooperative Objects (ICO) formal models of the entire interactive system can support predictive and summative performance evaluation activities by exploiting the models. Predictive performance evaluation is supported by ICO formal models of interactive systems enriched with perceptive, cognitive, and motoric information about the users. Summative usability evaluation is addressed at the level of the software system, which is able to exhaustively log all the user actions performed on the interactive system The articulation of these two evaluation approaches is demonstrated on a case study from the avionics domain with a step-by-step tutorial on how to apply the approach.