investigation into the validation of formalised cognitive dimensions

This paper presents a new approach to specifying critics for domain-specific visual language tools using a visual and templatebased approach. In this paper we describe our approach for specifying critics for domain-specific visual language tools. This allows target end-user tool developers to design and implement critics efficiently in a natural manner. We describe a survey that we conducted to evaluate our new approach and the Cognitive Dimensions approach that was applied in the survey questionnaire design. Survey results are briefly discussed along with the issues raised by some respondents to improve our approach.