Developing Intuitive User Interfaces by Integrating Users’ Mental Models into Requirements Engineering

Today, the demand for software that is ‘intuitive to use’ is very high. In fact, this has become a determining factor for the success of a system. However, building software that is intuitive to use is challenging. This is particularly true for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). They have to face a variety of problems to remain competitive: Usually no or just small staff is available that is specialized in user requirements engineering research, design, and testing. Furthermore, time schedules and budget are tight. All these factors require a method that delivers creative and intuitive–to–use software even with little design experience and expertise. In this paper, we address this problem by introducing a method for capturing and specifying the user’s mental models with image schemas and image-schematic metaphors during the requirements engineering phase of a software engineering project. This method also enables SMEs to systematically transfer these elicited requirements into design solutions, which then result in software that is intuitive to use.