Guiding the designer: A radar diagram process for applications with multiple layers

Journal article, 2010

Focusing flexibility and experience development, multi-layered design (MLD) separates the applications' graphical user interface into several layers based on the users' abilities, skills and levels of experience. The layer arrangement needs to be organized differently depending on the individual users. Until now design has been performed on a case-to-case basis and there has been no given process to achieve layered structures. This paper presents a radar diagram process for multiple layers (RDPM) that provides a way to map and visualize user parameters, identify user groups and then find mapping functions that can guide the final layered structure. The focus of RDPM is to identify the number of layers and the appropriate arrangement and contents of the layers. Two practical case studies are also presented to show how to apply the process on real user data. Both cases were successful and gave adequate support for how the process could be used. We conclude that RDPM is a viable support process to MW and other layered arrangements, and that it is ready to be further tuned and tested on a larger scale. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.