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 document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of Wright Laboratory or the U. S. Government. The U. S. Government is authorized to reproduce and distribute reprints for Government purposes notwithstanding any copyright notation thereon. This manuscript is submitted for publication with the understanding that the U. S. Government is authorized to reproduce and distribute reprints for Governmental purposes. Authors' address: School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15213; email: amy;wing@cs.cmu.edu. To appear, ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM), April 1995. Permission to copy without fee all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for direct commercial advantage, the ACM copyright notice and the title of the publication and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of the Association for Computing Machinery. To copy otherwise, or to republish, requires a fee and/or specific permission. c fl 1995 ACM xxxx-xxxx/xx/xxxx-xxxx $xx.xx 2 \Delta A. Moormann Zaremski and J. M. Wing ware libraries successfully, especially as libraries increase in size, is the availability of good tools to organize, navigate through, and retrieve from libraries. Currently many libraries use the file system for their only organization (directories and files) and file system and editor commands for navigation and retrieval. For example, the local ML library is organized with categories of components as directories (e.g., local/lib/Container/, local/lib/Threads/); one uses ls and

The Task Gallery is a window manager that uses interactive 3D graphics to provide direct support for task management and document comparison, lacking from many systems implementing the desktop metaphor. User tasks appear as artwork hung on the walls of a virtual art gallery, with the selected task on a stage. Multiple documents can be selected and displayed side-by-side using 3D space to provide uniform and intuitive scaling. The Task Gallery hosts any Windows application, using a novel redirection mechanism that routes input and output between the 3D environment and unmodified 2D Windows applications. User studies suggest that the Task Gallery helps with task management, is enjoyable to use, and that the 3D metaphor evokes spatial memory and cognition.

1Y8 I. That introductton was an important event in the history of personal computing because it changed notions of how interacttve systems should be designed. Several of Star’s designers. some of us responsible for the origmal dectpn and others for recent improvements, describe in this article where Star came from. what is distinctive about it. and how the original design has changed. In doing so. we hope to correct some misconception\ about Star that we have seen in the trade press and to relate some of what we have learned from designing it. For brevity, we use the name “Star” here to refer to both Star and its successor, Viewpoint. “ViewPoint ” refers exclu-sively to the current product. What Star is Star was designed as an office automa-tion system. The idea was that profession-als in a business or organization would have workstations on their desks and would use them to produce, retrieve, dis-tribute, and organize documentation, presentations, memos, and reports. All of the workstations in an organization would

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Speech-based user interfaces are growing in popularity. Unfortunately, the technology expertise required to build speech UIs precludes many individuals from participating in the speech interface design process. Furthermore, the time and knowledge costs of building even simple speech systems make it difficult for designers to iteratively design speech UIs. SUEDE, the speech interface prototyping tool we describe in this paper, allows designers to rapidly create prompt/response speech interfaces. It offers an electronically supported Wizard of Oz (WOz) technique that captures test data, allowing designers to analyze the interface after testing. This informal tool enables speech user interface designers, even non-experts, to quickly create, test, and analyze speech user interface prototypes.

The Blit is an experimental bitmap graphics terminal built for research into interactive computer graphics on the UNIX time-sharing system. The hardware is inexpensive and the graphics functions are implemented entirely in software. Nevertheless, the graphics performance of the Blit is comparable or superior to some displays with special purpose graphics hardware. This paper explains the paradox by referring to some principles of design: the hardware and software should be designed together to complement each other; carefully designed software can outperform infelicitous hardware; and simplicity of design leads to efficiency of execution. These principles are illustrated by examples from the Blit hardware and software and comparisons with other systems. March 30, 2000 _______________ * Current address: Bell Laboratories Murray Hill, New Jersey 07974 AT&T Bell Laboratories Holmdel, NJ 07733. Current address: Valid Logic Systems, Mountain View CA 94043 Hardware/Software Trad...

We describe a new information structure composed of multiple intersecting hierarchies, which we call Polyarchies. Visualizing polyarchies enables use of novel views for discovery of relationships which are very difficult using existing hierarchy visualization tools. This paper will describe the visualization design and system architecture challenges as well as our current solutions. A Mid-Tier Cache architecture is used as a "polyarchy server" which supports a novel web-based polyarchy visualization technique, called Visual Pivot.Aseriesoffive user studies guided iterative design of Visual Pivot.

that I have read this dissertation and that in my opinion it is fully adequate,

One of the common uses of bitmap terminals is to store multiple programming contexts in multiple, possibly overlapping, areas of the screen called windows. Windows traditionally store the visible state of a programming environment, such as an editor or debugger, while the user works with some other program. This model of interaction is attractive for one-process systems, but to make full use of a multiprogramming environment, windows must be asynchronously updated, even when partially or wholly obscured by other windows. For example, a long compilation may run in one window, displaying messages as appropriate, while the user edits a file in another window. This document describes a set of low-level graphics primitives to manipulate overlapping asynchronous windows, called layers, on a bitmap display terminal. Unlike previous window software such as [mey81] and [tes81], these primitives extend the domain of the general bitmap operator bitblt [gui82] to include bitmaps which are partiall...