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This paper reports on work to develop enhanced visual representations for graphical user interfaces in the form of three-dimensional icons designed as access points to information spaces. The aim is to enhance the interaction between user and interface object by adding ‘information depth’ and ‘information breadth’ to interface objects. The paper discusses the approach and describes some issues in the development of 3-dimensional representations.

This panel will identify some of the similarities amongst the different familiar graphical user interfaces that make them seem so indistinguishable. This panel will then identify some of the similarities that don't belong in any modern user interface.

The fixed nature of user interfaces to databases often means that they cannot easily be made to fit the requirements of a particular group of users or tasks. This paper looks at an approach to the interactive reconfiguration of such interfaces. Thus the creation of novel interfaces to the same database can be greatly speeded up and simplified. The paper shows how these concepts can be employed in the representation of schema design and queries to a semantic data model.

Various aspects of the complex problem of icon construction for user interface design are considered, ergosemiotic requirements for icon design are presented, and features and functions of iconic languages are defined.

What do you get when you put a human centred technology into a human centred organization? The answer is the human user interface (HUI). Voluntary organizations are, almost by definition, human centred. This chapter looks at some of the issues that have arisen as PC level computing has been introduced into such organizations.

The User Interface Management System (UIMS) SX/Tools allows the development of interactive graphical user interfaces following the principle of Direct Composition. The UIMS has been designed with specific consideration of requirements arising from industrial automation and control applications.

Five groups of developers with experience in the design of character-based user interfaces were taught graphical user interface design through a short workshop with a focus on practical design exercises using low-tech tools derived from the PICTIVE method. Several usability problems were found in the designs by applying the heuristic evaluation method, and feedback on these problems constituted a way to make the otherwise abstract usability principles concrete for the designers at the workshop. Based on these usability problems and on observations of the design process, we conclude that object-oriented interactions are especially hard to design and that the developers were influenced by the graphical interfaces of personal computers with which they had interacted as regular users.

A tool is presented which allows graphic layout of a user interface integrated with specification of behavior using pre- and postconditions.

This chapter describes an object-oriented framework for building direct-manipulation user interfaces. Based on the concept of “mode”, the framework extends the Model-View-Con†roller (MVC) paradigm to accommodate an orthogonal design. It provides a clean structure for the user interface components and increases their reusability.

The term user interface refers to the combined environment of data presentation using output devices and different interaction methodologies using input devices. The crucial role that the quality of the user interface plays in the utilization of the system can be appreciated by examining aspects such as responsiveness, capabilities, graphics (colors, two dimensional or three dimensional), ease of use, ease of learning, naturalness, and accuracy.

A survey of the participants identified a broad list of user interface issues, which were then grouped in the following categories: Information Exchange Realtime Intelligent Interfaces Support for Problem Solving

underlying programming language. However, it is significantly easier to use, and provides many of the adMany modern user interface development environments vantages for graphics programming that financial spreaduse constraints to connect graphical objects. Constraints sheets provide for business. are relationships that are declared once and then maintained by the system. Often, systems provide graphical, iconic, or C32 is different from previous spreadsheet systems for user demonstrational techniques for specifying some coninterface construction because it uses a wide array of visual straints, but these are incapable of expressing all desired and inferencing techniques so the user does not have to relationships, and it is always necessary to allow the user write the entire constraint by hand. In particular: interface designer to write code to specify complex constraints. The spreadsheet interface described here, called • C32 automatically generates appropriate references to C32, provides the programmer with the full power of writgraphical objects when the user clicks on the object in a ing constraint code in the underlying programming lanuser interface window. guage, but it is significantly easier to use. Unlike other • It uses demonstrational techniques to guess which spreadsheets tools for graphics, C32 automatically properties of objects should be used, generates appropriate object references from mouse clicks • It guesses how to parameterize constraints when they are in graphics windows and uses inferencing and demonstracopied from one place to another or generalized into tional techniques to make constructing and copying conprocedures, so abstract and reusable constraints can be straints easier. In addition, C32 also supports monitoring constructed by example. and debugging interfaces by watching values in the spread• It incorporates graphical techniques to help trace and sheet while the user interface is running. debug constraints. • It is integrated with an existing prototype-instance sys

This paper aspires to make three points: (1) that certain graphical interfaces are especially easy to learn and use, (2) that special graphical deduction / computation systems are possible, and (3) that perhaps points (1) and (2) are intimately related, i.e., that graphical interfaces may be especially useful because they engage special human graphical reasoning processes.

An overview is given of user-interface development systems (UIDS). Systems are classified by how they let the programmer specify the interfaces, and examples of each type are given. The three types are language-based, graphical, and automatic creation interfaces. Shortcomings of UIDS and user-interface toolkits are discussed. >

In this paper an approach to the problem of specification of user interfaces for computer activity is described. It is based on work done in attempting to provide a tool for a formal definition of the user interface to a job transfer and manipulation network protocol.

One of the most difficult aspects of creating graphical, direct manipulation user interfaces is managing the relationships between the graphical objects on the screen and the application data structures that they represent. Coral (Constraint-based Object-oriented Relations And Language) is a new user interface toolkit under development that uses efficiently-implemented constraints to support these relationships. Using Coral, user interface designers can construct interaction techniques such as menus and scroll bars. More importantly, Coral makes it easy to construct direct-manipulation user interfaces specialized to particular applications. Unlike previous constraint-based toolkits, Coral supports defining constraints in the abstract, and then applying them to different object instances. In addition, it provides iteration constructs where lists of items (such as those used in menus) can be constrained as a group. Coral has two interfaces: a declarative interface that provides a convenient way to specify the desired constraints, and a procedural interface that will allow a graphical user interface management system (UIMS) to automatically create Coral calls.

A CAD system is a tool for the designer. If he is to make full use of the system, the user must be able to interact easily with it. This interaction takes place via the user interface, the facilities such as the keyboard and graphics tablet (see Module 2.1) that allow the user to input information to the system.

XY-WINS is an integrated environment that supports design, prototyping, implementation, and debugging of graphical user interfaces. XY-WINS tools allow user interface designers to work at an abstract level, thus enabling non-experts in computer graphics to quickly prototype graphical interfaces. However, the tools also allow great flexibility in defining graphical features. XY-WINS supports the development of user interfaces consisting of two main modules: a Graphical Abstract Machine (GRAM), and a High-level Interaction Component (HIC). The GRAM encapsulates the lower levels of input and output, and provides the HIC with an abstract view of the user based on abstract representations of pictures and on input tokens incoming through input channels. The HIC implements the dialogue between this abstraction of the user and the back-end of the system.The environment provides tools for generating a GRAM from abstract specifications of the graphical constructs and the input tokens that are to be used in a user interface. These specifications can be edited interactively and graphically. The HIC can be specified as a system of independent communicating processes/objects by using a high-level concurrent language, which also includes control structures designed to support the definition of complex user/system interactions. Finally, an interactive debugging system allows one to execute the user interface, while simultaneously visualizing end-user screen, state of the GRAM, and state of the HIC.

User interfaces based on mice, bitmap displays and windows are becoming commonplace, and there are guidelines on how such interfaces should function [Apple 85]. As a consequence, there is a growing expectation that all programs, no matter how trivial or how complicated, should present a graphically elegant and sophisticated user interface.

We present a methodology for the design of interactive user interfaces. This methodology provides the designer with a number of steps to be followed in the design of a user interface. Examples of a formal notation for describing user interfaces are presented. This methodology also provides the designer with a number of techniques for evaluating his design. We present a list of desirable properties for a user interface design methodology. Our design methodology has all of these properties.

The Mickey UIMS maps the user interface style and techniques of the Apple Macintosh onto the declarative constructs of Pascal. The relationships between user interfaces and the programming language control the interface generation. This imposes some restrictions on the possible styles of user interfaces but greatly enhances the usability of the UIMS.