Current interactive user interface construction tools are often more of a hindrance than a benefit during the early stages of user interface design. These tools take too much time to use and force designers to specify more of the design details than they wish at this early stage. Most interface designers, especially those who have a background in graphic design, prefer to sketch early interface ideas on paper or on a whiteboard. We are developing an interactive tool called SILK that allows designers to quickly sketch an interface using an electronic pad and stylus. SILK preserves the important properties of pencil and paper: a rough drawing can be produced very quickly and the medium is very flexible. However, unlike a paper sketch, this electronic sketch is interactive and can easily be modified. In addition, our system allows designers to examine, annotate, and edit a complete history of the design. When the designer is satisfied with this early prototype, SILK can transform the sket...

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Almost as long as there have been user interfaces, there have been special software systems and tools to help design and implement the user interface software. Many of these tools have demonstrated significant productivity gains for programmers, and have become important commercial products. Others have proven less successful at supporting the kinds of user interfaces people want to build. This article discusses the different kinds of user interface software tools, and investigates why some approaches have worked and others have not. Many examples of commercial and research systems are included. Finally, current research directions and open issues in the field are discussed.

Modern window-based user interface systems generate user interface events as natural products of their normal operation. Because such events can be automatically captured and because they indicate user behavior with respect to an application's user interface, they have long been regarded as a potentially fruitful source of information regarding application usage and usability. However, because user interface events are typically voluminos and rich in detail, automated support is generally required to extract information at a level of abstraction that is useful to investigators interested in analyzing application usage or evaluating usability. This survey examines computer-aided techniques used by HCI practitioners and researchers to extract usability-related information from user interface events. A framework is presented to help HCI practitioners and researchers categorize and compare the approaches that have been, or might fruitfully be, applied to this problem. Because many of the techniques in the research literature have not been evaluated in practice, this survey provides a conceptual evaluation to help identify some of the relative merits and drawbacks of the various classes of approaches. Ideas for future research in this area are also presented. This survey addresses the following questions: How might user interface events be used in evaluating usability? How are user interface events related to other forms of usability data? What are the key challenges faced by investigators wishing to exploit this data? What approaches have been brought to bear on this problem and how do they compare to one another? What are some of the important open research questions in this area?

This article summarizes the historical development of major advances in humancomputer interaction technology, emphasizing the pivotal role of university research in the advancement of the field.

A user interface software tool helps developers design and implement the user interface. Research on past tools has had enormous impact on today's developers---virtually all applications today were built using some form of user interface tool. In this paper, we consider cases of both success and failure in past user interface tools. From these cases we extract a set of themes which can serve as lessons for future work. Using these themes, past tools can be characterized by what aspects of the user interface they addressed, their threshold and ceiling, what path of least resistance they offer, how predictable they are to use, and whether they addressed a target that became irrelevant. We believe the lessons of these past themes are particularly important now, because increasingly rapid technological changes are likely to significantly change user interfaces. We are at the dawn of an era where user interfaces are about to break out of the "desktop" box where they have been stuck for the ...

One of the problems with conventional UIMSs is that very often there is no graphical way to specify interfaces. This paper describes OPUS, the user interface editor of the Penguims UIMS. This system allows the presentation component of graphical user interfaces to be specified interactively in a graphical notation without explicit programming. The Penguims UIMS supports an underlying model of computation based loosely on spreadsheets. In particular, it supports incremental computations based on a system of equations (one-way constraints) over a set of named values (spreadsheet cells). These equations are used to provide immediate feedback at all levels of the interface. They are used to incrementally determine the position and dynamic appearance of the individual interactor objects that make up the interface. They are also used to connect the presentation directly to underlying application data thereby supporting semantic feedback. The OPUS user interface editor employs a special graphical notation for specifying the presentation component of a user interface. This notation allows the power of the underlying computational model to be expressed simply and quickly. The resulting presentations are very flexible in nature. They can automatically respond to changes in the size and position of display objects and can directly support derivation of their appearance from application data objects.

Model-based user interface development environments show promise for improving the productivity of user interface developers, and possibly for improving the quality of developed interfaces. While model-based techniques have previously been applied to the area of database interfaces, they have not been specifically targeted at the important area of object database applications. Such applications make use of models that are semantically richer than their relational counterparts in terms of both data structures and application functionality. In general, model-based techniques have not addressed how the information referenced in such applications is manifested within the described models, and is utilised within the generated interface itself. This lack of experience with such systems has led to many model-based projects providing minimal support for certain features that are essential to such data intensive applications, and has prevented object database interface developers in particular from benefiting from model-based techniques. This paper presents the Teallach model-based user interface development environment for object databases, describing the models it supports, the relationships between these models, the tool used to construct interfaces using the models and the generation of Java programs from the declarative models. Distinctive features of Teallach include comprehensive facilities for linking models, a flexible development method, an open architecture, and the generation of running applications based on the models constructed by designers.

It is very time-consuming and expensive to create the graphical, highly-interactive styles of user interfaces that are increasingly common. User Interface Management Systems (UIMSs) attempt to make the creation of user interfaces easier, but most existing UIMSs cannot create the low-level interaction techniques (pop-up, pull-down and fixed menus, on-screen "light buttons", scroll-bars, ela-borate feedback mechanisms and animations, etc.) that are frequently used. This paper describes Peridot, a system that automatically creates the code for these user inter-faces while the designer demonstrates to the system how the interface should look and work. Peridot uses rule-based inferencing so no programming by the designer is required, and Direct Manipulation techniques are used to create Direct Manipulation interfaces, which can make full use of a mouse and other input devices. This allows extremely rapid protetyping of user interfaces.

Toolkits and other tools have dramatically reduced the time and technical expertise needed to design and implement graphical user interfaces (GUIs) allowing high-quality, iterative, user-centered design to become a common practice. Unfortunately the generation of functioning prototypes for physical interactive devices as not had similar support – it still requires substantial time and effort by individuals with highly specialized skills and tools. This creates a divide between a designers ’ ability to explore form and interactivity of product designs and the ability to iterate on the basis of high fidelity interactive experiences with a functioning prototype. To help overcome this difficulty we have developed the Calder hardware toolkit. Calder is a development environment for rapidly exploring and prototyping functional physical interactive devices. Calder provides a set of reusable small input and output components, and integration into existing interface prototyping environments. These components communicate with a computer using wired and wireless connections. Calder is a tool targeted toward product and interaction designers to aid them in their early design process. In this paper we describe the process of gaining an understanding of the needs and workflow habits of our target users to generate a collection of requirements for such a toolkit. We describe technical challenges imposed by these needs, and the specifics of design and implementation of the toolkit to meet these challenges. ACM Classification: H5.2. Information interfaces and