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Usability evaluation is an increasingly important part of the user interface design process. However, usability evaluation can be expensive in terms of time and human resources, and automation is therefore a promising way to augment existing approaches. This article presents an extensive survey of usability evaluation methods, organized according to a new taxonomy that emphasizes the role of automation. The survey analyzes existing techniques, identifies which aspects of usability evaluation automation are likely to be of use in future research, and suggests new ways to expand existing approaches to better support usability evaluation. Categories and Subject Descriptors: H.1.2 [Information Systems]: User/Machine Systems—human factors; human information processing; H.5.2 [Information Systems]: User Interfaces—benchmarking; evaluation/methodology; graphical user

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.

Research on model-based user interface development tools is about 10 years old. Many approaches and prototype systems have been investigated in universities and research laboratories around the world. This paper proposes a generic architecture for these tools, reviews the different approaches in light of this architecture, and discusses their progress towards the goals of increasing the quality and reducing the cost of developing interfaces. The paper closes with a discussion of challenges for future model-based development tools. Keywords Model-based interface development, automatic user interface generation, user interface design.

In order to give people ubiquitous access to software applications, device controllers, and Internet services, it will be necessary to automatically adapt user interfaces to the computational devices at hand (e.g., cell phones, PDAs, touch panels, etc.). While previous researchers have proposed solutions to this problem, each has limitations. This paper proposes a novel solution based on treating interface adaptation as an optimization problem. When asked to render an interface on a specific device, our Supple system searches for the rendition that meets the device’s constraints and minimizes the estimated effort for the user’s expected interface actions. We make several contributions: 1) precisely defining the interface rendition problem, 2) demonstrating how user traces can be used to customize interface rendering to particular user’s usage pattern, 3) presenting an efficient interface rendering algorithm, 4) performing experiments that demonstrate the utility of our approach.

The personal universal controller (PUC) is an approach for improving the interfaces to complex appliances by introducing an intermediary graphical or speech interface. A PUC engages in two-way communication with everyday appliances, first downloading a specification of the appliance's functions, and then automatically creating an interface for controlling that appliance. The specification of each appliance includes a high-level description of every function, a hierarchical grouping of those functions, and dependency information, which relates the availability of each function to the appliance's state. Dependency information makes it easier for designers to create specifications and helps the automatic interface generators produce a higher quality result. We describe the architecture that supports the PUC, and the interface generators that use our specification language to build high-quality graphical and speech interfaces.

This paper describes an approach to the automatic presentation of multimedia documents based on parsing and syntax-directed translation using Relational Grammars. This translation is followed by a constraint solving mechanism to create the final layout. Grammatical rules provide the mechanism for mapping from a representation of the content of a presentation to forms that specify the media objects to be realized. These realization forms include sets of spatial and temporal constraints between elements of the presentation. Individual grammars encapsulate the "look and feel" of a presentation and can be used as generators of that style. By making the grammars sensitive to the requirements of the output medium, parsing can introduce flexibility into the information realization process. Keywords: Automatic design, grammar-directed design, visual languages, relational grammars, parsing, constraints 2: Introduction A fully functioning multimedia system requires a wide range of stages to achi...

People often use a variety of computing devices, such as PCs, PDAs, and cell phones, to access the same information. The user interface to this information needs to be different for each device, due to the different input and output constraints of each device. Currently designers designing such multi-device user interfaces either have to design a UI separately for each device, which is time consuming, or use a program to automatically generate interfaces, which often result in interfaces that are awkward. Each method also discourages iterative design, considered critical for creating good user interfaces. We are creating a system called Damask to support the early-stage design of user interfaces targeted at multiple devices. With Damask, the designer will design a user interface for one device, by sketching the design and by specifying which design patterns the interface uses. The patterns will help Damask generate user interfaces optimized for the other devices targeted by the designer. The generated interfaces will be of sufficient quality so that it will be more convenient to use Damask than to design each of the other interfaces separately, and the ease with which designers will be able to create designs will encourage them to engage in iterative design. Damask will also

User interface design and development for knowledgebased systems and most other types of applications is a resource-consuming activity. Thus, many attempts have been made to automate, to certain degrees, the construction of user interfaces. Current tools for automated design of user interfaces are able to generate the static layout of an interface from the application's data model using an intelligent program that applies design rules. These tools, however, are not capable of generating the dynamic behavior of the interface, which must be specified programmatically, and which constitutes most of the effort of interface construction. Mecano is a model-based userinterface development environment that uses a domain model to generate both the static layout and the dynamic behavior of an interface. A knowledge-based system applies sets of dialog design and layout rules to produce interfaces from the domain model. Mecano has been used successfully to completely generate the layout and the dynamic behavior of relatively large and complex, domainspecific, form- and graph-based interfaces for applications in medicine and several other domains.

This study is devoted to the layout problem in the TRIDENT project (Tools foR an Interactive Development ENvironmenT) , which is dedicated to highly interactive business -oriented applications. In this project, the placement problem consists of a computer-aided visual placement of interaction objects (IO) included in a more composite IO called Presentation Unit (PU). Two strategies for placing IO within a PU are characterised and investigated : a static twocolumn based strategy and a dynamic right/bottom strategy. Each strategy decomposes the placement into three partially overlapping dimensions : localisation, dimensioning, and arrangement. A set of simple mathematical relationships is introduced to rate the quality of visual principles gained with the result of each strategy within the three dimensions. This rating shows that the lack of flexibility should lead us more towards a dynamic strategy for computer-aided visual placement. KEYWORDS: Dynamic Strategy, Grid, Interaction Objec...