Read the following question carefully, and answer what the question is asking for: "What", "When",

"Why", "How Many" and provide examples where required.

Smith & Sons, Inc. is a large investment company located in Tampa, Florida, that buys stocks, bonds, commodities, and various other assets for their clients. They also manage their clients' investment portfolios for a variety of investment objectives. Finding new people with money to invest is crucial to their success, so keeping track of their clients and potential clients is very important. Morgan Adamson is the senior analyst in charge of the new sales prospect and contact management system at Richards & Sons, Inc. The new system has just been installed and the project team is working with the system users 2 who are doing acceptance testing. Morgan is talking to Kevin Brock, the junior analyst who was responsible for the design of the system's user interface.

Morgan I guess you've heard that some of the system users are not very happy with the new contact tracking system. In particular, they are expressing dissatisfaction with the user interface that you designed. Kevin I don't understand what the problem could be -- I put a lot of time and effort into that design. What are the specific problems?

Morgan some of the users are complaining that they don't know what to do next or how to use some of the screens. Are you sure that all of the screens are consistent throughout this system?

Kevin I didn't think it was important where the information was as long as I clearly labeled it. Besides, the users should be expected to read the screen. I deliberately put lots of highlighting, blinking, and reverse video fields on the screens to draw attention to important information.

Morgan Yes, I know. Some of the users claim that there is so much highlighted information that it distracts from the purpose of the screen. I've also had complaints that proper default values were not specified for some of the fields.

Kevin Default values were specified for the most common fields, but the users should expect to have to type some of the information in -- that's their job, isn't it?

Morgan In some cases, maybe several possible default values should have been provided in a pop-up window to eliminate possible keying errors. Remember, we want to reduce the amount of user entry keystrokes as much as possible. Some of the clerks say that they don't understand some of the terminology and abbreviations on some of the screens.

Kevin Oops! I must not have checked the screens carefully enough to catch some of the computer terminology. That's no big deal. I can fix that right away. Are there any other problems?

Morgan other users have indicated that the use of certain menu options are not consistent across all of the screens. Didn't you use the same labels and screen buttons or menus for the same actions throughout the entire interface?

Kevin No, I didn't. I thought that I could reuse the buttons/function keys to mean different things as long as I clearly labeled them on each screen.

Morgan Why?

Kevin some of the keyboards have only 12 function keys and I was afraid I might run out of keys to assign unless I reused them.

Morgan you need to realize that the system users don't always read the instructions that you provide. Whether that is right or wrong is not important; you need to be consistent so that the users don't have to learn a different set of function keys for each screen.

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Kevin I guess I really didn't think that through very well -- it shouldn't be too difficult to make all the function key assignments consistent.

Morgan There has also been some complaints about an insufficient amount of help messages for some of the input screens. For instance, one clerk said the contact entry screen consistently refused to accept the date of contact he tried to enter.

The system did output an error message indicating that the date was incorrect and should be reentered, but the clerk doesn't understand why the date was invalid.

He says that the system doesn't provide any information about the correct format of the date or any valid examples. You did design help screens and messages for each of the input screens, didn't you?

Kevin Uh, well, I'm not exactly sure what you mean by a "help" screen. I did very thorough input error checking so that invalid data could not be entered. I created error messages for each of the edited fields. I thought that would be sufficient for the users to identify the input error and make the necessary correction.

Morgan I think I'm beginning to understand the problem. We need to talk about some very important human engineering guidelines that you need to follow whenever you are designing a user interface. First ...(we will leave their meeting now)

Provide an outline of a strategy that you would follow to avoid these problems.