Designing graphical user interfaces by direct composition

Abstract

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.Among the more important features of sx/rools is the ability to handle interactive graphi~ ~ (e.g. polylines, circles, etc.) and widely used control elements (e.g. buttons, menus, etc.) in a uniform way. Other characteristics of this UIMS are extensibility, end-user adaptability and openness towards the integration of existing and new interaction techniques.SX/Tools supports the reuse of existing widget sets (e.g., OSF/Motif, Sun OLIT). Currently we are enhancing the system to support multimedia user interfaces. INDUSTRIAL REQUIREMENTS FOR USER INTERFACE MANAGEMENT SYSTEMSUIMSs in industrial use have to fulfil requirements which are of minor importance in an academic context. Important requirements are uniform design mechanisms independent of interaction media, techniques, and styles as well as a straightforward end-user adaptability of user interfaces. Additionally, the ability for evolutionary change from existing user interfaces to newly developed ones and the coexistence of old and new user interfaces in one environment are of major importance in industrial settings. Finally, conformity to standards and widely used system components and programming languages are important factors for the success of a UIMS. THE PRINCIPLE OF DIRECT COMPOSITIONThe term "direct composition" stands for the thorough application of the principle of direct manipulation to the design and development of graphical user interfaces. It characterizes a fully object-oriented approach to the creation and specification of a user interface without using specialized tools. Direct composition is based on an elementary conceptual model of user interface objects. This object model contains both a model of the object's interactive design, and a model of its interactive behavior when using it in the appropriate applicational context. For this reason each user interface composed of those objects contains a model of its own design and its use.The static appearance and the interactive behavior of objects described by the conceptual model, which is based on the direct compositkm philosophy, can be designed by using purely interactive techniques. New objects can be copied or derived from existing ones and both new interface objects and entire user interfaces can be composed directly by using existing objects. As a consequence, each object has exactly one set of elementary interaction techniques, one part of which is being used for the dialog with the end-user of a user interface and another not necess=-ily disjoint part for the dialog with its designer. THE UIMS SX/TOOLSThe UIMS SX/Tools follows the principle of direct composition. It has been developed strictly object-oriented (using C++ as the implementation language) and fulfils most of the important requirement...

Agent-oriented design of human–computer interface: application to supervision of an urban transport network

“…For example(Péninou et al, 1999) have studied the possible applications of multi-agent systems for adaptative interfaces (in the sense given by(Edmonds, 1981;Schneider-Hufschmidt et al, 1993)). 2 The two other types of function not studied here are: transition tasks during changes in process operating speed and specific procedure tasks.…”