A study of interface design improvement in an engineering data management system on the world wide web

This research develops an engineering data management system (EDMS) on the world wide web (WWW) according to design principles of human–computer interfaces. Firstly, an existing EDMS on WWW was evaluated by International Standardization Organization interface checklist. The results indicated that the links of this system were not organized reasonably, with too many operational layers, and unclear meanings of some icons. Therefore, in this system, the links were rearranged by using frames and a homepage, the operative layers were reduced, and the unclear icons were eliminated to increase the transmission speed. In addition, Visual Basic Script and ActiveX were applied to improve the system efficiency. Finally, an experiment was conducted to verify the effects of the improvement. The results revealed that the improved link methods and the reduced layers could improve the users' performance, and the elimination of the unclear icons did not significantly decrease user satisfaction.