The international standard regarding to the user interface (UI) is developed at sub-committee 35 (SC35) of joint technical committee 1 (JTC1) in ISO and IEC. As for the range of the discussion, a variety of interface elements like the keyboard, the screen icon, the sound, the sense of touch, pen gesture, and the method of the navigation etc. are included. It explains the activity of work group 4 (WG4) that discusses User Interface for the mobile device, such as gesture command and icons in that.

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In order to improve the usability of a system, it is important to evaluate by the early stage of a design and the stage which does not still have a prototype. Because it cannot return to a basis of design, even if the basic problem of a design is found after a prototype is done. The problem that is removable without difficulty in early stages of design will remain not solved after all. However, there was no suitable evaluation technique in this stage. This research propose the technique that a designer evaluates himself in the early stage of design using “screen transition diagram ” which is drown by the designer and “evaluation check sheet” which is proposed here. It is said that it is difficult for a designer to evaluate objectively by users point of view. However, this research showed that designer can find problems by himself by using the “evaluation check sheet” which is designed specialized for the “screen transition diagram”.

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Lack of user evaluation at the beginning process of design may result in unusable Web sites and it requires significant cost to fix its usability problems. To deal with the issue, various prototypes of design alternatives are created and used as requirements activities. In website design, the prototypes include paper-based prototype and working version. Lin et al. proposed DENIM, a sketch-based website design tool to create website prototypes. However, DENIM assumes a computer-based input device (e.g., tablet PC) for quick and easy-to-use approach, and it in turn reduces the advantages of actual paper-based approach such as flexibility, portability and communicability. In this paper, we focus on paper-based prototype to take advantage of actual paper. We developed a system called Kisaragi to transform paper-based prototypes into computer-based working version, as well as combine it with a working version created with conventional design tools. We evaluated the use of Kisaragi in website design and confirmed its usefulness.

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The artifact development theory is an approach to investigate the reason why some specific artifact was selected by some specific user in some specific situation and why other artifacts were not selected from among various possible alternatives. For the purpose of communication, there are such alternatives as land line, cell phone, internet mail, cell phone mail, letter, telegram, message forwarding, face to face meeting, etc. We conducted a questionnaire research for 70 senior people and 68 young people on which communication media will be selected in 11 different situations. The result showed that (1) senior people use the land line and the letter while young people use the cell phone and the cell phone mail in principle and that (2) the tendency of media selection varies depending on the situation.

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In this paper, our experience in customer-centered design processes based on the HCD methodologies is introduced, which describes how a lot of useful and easy-to-use functions are planned and realized in our digital color multifunction peripherals.

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