Une approche pragmatique cognitive de l'interaction personne/système informatisé

Abstract

This article proposes an inferential approach for the study of human/computer interaction. It is by taking into account the user's cognitive activity while working at a computer that we propose to understand this interaction. This approach leads to a real user/interface evaluation and, hopefully, will serve as guidelines for the design of new interfaces. Our analysis describes the inferential process involved in the dynamics of task performance. The cognitive activity of the user is grasped by the mean of a " thinking aloud " method through which the user is asked to verbalize while working at the computer. Tools developed by our research team for the categorization of the verbal protocols are presented. The results are interpreted within the relevance theory framework (Sperber &Wilson,1995) in terms of cognitive effort of the user while interpreting the information appearing on the screen (language, icons, graphs...) and the cognitive effects of these objects. This approach can be generalized to any other human/computer interface as, for example, telelearning.

Keywords

• human-computer interaction
• cognitive pragmatics
• inference
• relevance