PROCEEDlNGS OF THE HUMAN FACTORS SOCIETY-3lst ANNUAL MEETING1987 RAPID--SOFTWARE FOR PROTOTYPING USER INTERFACES

The present paper describes 1) the operation of a software tool for interface prototyping--RAPID--that is designed for software designers and human engineering specialists to use in support of design iteration and experimentation and 2) an application of this prototyping tool in the development of consumer products. RAPID simulates the appearance and function of small control panels including commonly-used displays and controls using the Smalltalk-80TM computing environment. The experience of using the design tool in a product development effort has provided a means of evaluating the success of this approach for supporting the product development cycle and improving the quality of the human-machine interface. RAPID ( u p i d Prototyper forhterface- Design) is a software environment developed at Honeywell that supports the prototyping of user interfaces for consumer products that use simple controls and displays. The present paper outlines the functionality of the RAPID software and describes our experience using the system to design and tes