Toward Cognitive Modeling for Predicting Usability

Historically, predictive human performance modeling has been successful at predicting the task execution time of skilled users on a desktop computer. More recent work has predicted novice behavior in web searches. This paper reports on a collaborative effort between industry and academia to expand the scope of predictive modeling to the mobile phone domain, both skilled and novice behavior, and how human performance relates to the perception of usability. Since, at this writing, only preliminary results to validate models of mobile phone use are in, we describe the process we will use to progress towards our modeling goals.