TRIAL EXPERIMENTAL DETERMINATION OF THE AVERAGE TIMES OF ACTIONS EXECUTED IN A CAD APPLICATION

The efficiency of CAD programs largely depends of the efficiency of their user interface. Relative efficiency can be defined as the inverse value of the effort involved during the design process. One of the possibilities for expressing the effort is to calculate, i.e. to sum up, the time required to fulfil one design task. Such value depends on the physical characteristics of the specific designer and hence cannot be valid. Another possibility is to determine average times of typical actions in the design process, such as mouse click, mouse move, typing of a number etc., and then evaluate the total effort by summing the products of average action times and counted number of actions in a design session. This paper presents an original methodology for experimental determination of the average times of the actions executed in a CAD application. In order to conduct the experiment, a web application, based on the proposed methodology, was developed. Based on the first experiences, it can be concluded that the presented methodology and application are suitable for experimental determination of the average times of CAD modeling actions. However, there is still room for improvement in its usability.

TOWARDS A METHODOLOGY FOR CAD PROGRAM EFFICIENCY ASSESSMENT

All CAD programs differ when it comes toAll CAD programs differ when it comes toefficiency. The efficiency of a CAD program depends on itsfunctionality and the user interface. The aim of this researchis to investigate possible methodologies for the assessment ofefficiency of CAD software in regard to its user interface.Based on an analysis of the interactions between the user andthe CAD programs user interface, six elementary user actionswere detected. Every user action requires some effort.Efficiency is defined as an inverse value of the total effort thathas been invested in the design process. Therefore, toevaluate the efficiency of a CAD program, it is necessary tocalculate the total effort. In this paper, four possiblemethodologies for determining the overall effort during thedesign process are presented. For each method, processparameters that should be measured in order to calculate theefficiency are defined.