Abstract not found

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.

This article proposes and tests a two-component model for describing and programming the finegrained aspects of non-WIMP interaction. The model combines a data-flow or constraint-like component for the continuous relationships with an event-based component for discrete interactions, which can enable or disable individual continuous relationships. Its key ingredients are the separation of non-WIMP interaction into two components and the framework it provides for communication between the two

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 ...

A multi-user Virtual World has been implemented combining a flexible-object simulator with a multisensory user interface, including hand motion and gestures, speech input and output, sound output, and 3-D stereoscopic graphics with head-motion parallax. The implementation is based on a distributed client/server architecture with a centralized Dialogue Manager. The simulator is inserted into the Virtual World as a server. A discipline for writing interaction dialogues provides a clear conceptual hierarchy and the encapsulation of state. This hierarchy facilitates the creation of alternative interaction scenarios and shared multiuser environments.

Users who are blind currently have limited access to graphical user interfaces based on MS Windows or X Windows. Past access strategies have used speech synthesizers and braille displays to present text-based interfaces. Providing access to graphical applications creates new human interface design challenges which must be addressed to build intuitive and efficient nonvisual interfaces. Two contrasting designs have been developed and implemented in the projects Mercator and GUIB. These systems differ dramatically in their approaches to providing nonvisual interfaces to GUIs. This paper discusses four main interface design issues for access systems, and describes how the Mercator and GUIB designs have addressed these issues. It is hoped that the exploration of these interfaces will lead to better nonvisual interfaces used in low visibility and visually overloaded environments. KEYWORDS Nonvisual HCI, blind users, graphical user interfaces, auditory interfaces, tactile interfaces INTRODU...

This paper proposes a new programming language and environment for children. This system will be designed to be easy to learn and use, without sacrificing the power necessary to create sophisticated programs that rival commercial software such as games and simulations. Throughout the design and refinement of this system, I will apply prior results from empirical studies of programmers and the psychology of programming, my own empirical studies about the ways that nonprogrammers naturally express solutions to programming tasks, and usability testing.

Multimodal interaction combines input from multiple sensors such as pointing devices or speech recognition systems, in order to achieve more fluid and natural interaction. Two-handed interaction has been used recently to enrich graphical interaction. Building applications that use such combined interaction requires new software techniques and frameworks. Using additional devices means that user interface toolkits must be more flexible with regard to input devices and event types. The possibility of parallel interactions must also be taken into account, with consequences on the structure of toolkits. Finally, frameworks must be provided for the combination of events and status of several devices. This paper reports on the extensions we made to the direct manipulation interface toolkit Whizz in order to experiment two-handed interaction. These extensions range from structural adaptations of the toolkit to new techniques for specifying the time-dependent fusion of events. 1 INTRODUCTION ...

... advent of new technologies and user-centred concerns, the user interface portion of interactive systems is becoming increasingly large and complex. In this article, we discuss agent-based architectural styles and show how sound tradeoffs between conflicting requirements and properties can be done using the PAC-Amodeus conceptual model.

ABSTRACT: The paper addresses the formal specification, design and implementation of the behavioral component of graphical user interfaces. The complex sequences of visual events and actions that constitute dialogs are speci-fied by means of modular, communicating grammars called VEG (Visual Event Grammars), which extend traditional BNF grammars to make them more convenient to model dialogs. A VEG specification is independent of the actual layout of the GUI, but it can easily be integrated with various layout design toolkits. Moreover, a VEG specification may be verified with the model checker SPIN, in order to test consistency and correctness, to detect deadlocks and unreachable states, and also to generate test cases for validation purposes. Efficient code is automatically generated by the VEG toolkit, based on compiler technology. Realistic applica-tions have been specified, verified and implemented, like a Notepad-style editor, a graph construction library and a large real application to medical software. It is also argued that VEG can be used to specify and test voice interfaces and multi-modal dialogs. The major contribution of our work is blending together a set of features coming from GUI design, compilers, software engineering and formal verification. Even though we do not claim novelty in each of the techniques adopted for VEG, they have been united into a toolkit supporting all GUI design phases, i.e., specification, design, verification and validation, linking to applications and coding. 1