Human-Computer Interaction meets Economics: How to Measure Interface Utility

I am a very very new bee in the world of Human Computer Interaction. I found this Google techtalk interesting. Measuring user satisfaction of an user interface is still an open problem in HCI. Here these guys have made a monetary model to measure the user satisfaction.

Think of your job. What does your job offer to you. The list may be like this. Some tasks, enjoyment, challenge, self recognition and wage/salary. So these are the parameters to your overall job satisfaction. So if any parameter among these decreases like if the job is less enjoyable, less challenging then the employer may increase the salaries to keep employes. At the same time we can thin one step back and measure the other parameters than salary during the interview session, with how much salary the job seeker is asking for.

In this talk this job scenario has been used to evaluate multiple user interfaces for a particular task. First make multiple version of user interfaces for a particular task. Ask for real human to do the task with different interfaces, Now calculate the average cost associated with each interface. That will give you an idea about the user satisfaction of your user interface.