François Bodart

Encapsulating knowledge for intelligent automatic interaction objects selection

TRIDENT is a set of interactive tools that automatically generates a user interface for highly-interactive business-oriented applications. It includes an intelligent interaction objects selection based on three different concepts. First, on object oriented typology classifies abstract interaction objects to allow a presentation independent selection. Second, guidelines are translated into automatic rules to select abstract interaction objects from both an application data model and a dialog model. Third, these guidelines are encapsulated in a decision tree technique to make the reasoning obvious to the user. This approach guarantees a target environment independent user interface. Once this specified, abstract interaction objects are mapped into concrete interaction objects to produce the observable interface.

A Model-Based Approach to Presentation: A Continuum from Task Analysis to Prototype

This paper presents a complete model-based approach to the building of presentation for a business oriented highly interactive application. This approach is considered complete in the sense that it supports a continuum from task analysis to a first prototype without disruption. The main steps involved in the proposed methodology include a task analysis performed as a hierarchical decomposition of the interactive task into sub-tasks, a specification of the functional requirements and its integration with task analysis results, a writing of an activity chaining graph which graphically depicts the information and function flow within the task, the selection of an interaction style, the definition of presentation units, the selection of abstract interaction objects, their transformation into concrete objects to be placed before generating a first prototype. The described methodology not only consists of the definition of these steps, but also shows how computer-aided tools can automatically generate the presentation of such an interface.

Towards a Systematic Building of Software Architecture: the TRIDENT Methodological Guide

When designers are facing the question how to build an application architecture practically, they often have to consider various arguments and factors coming from different perspectives: decomposition criteria in architecture design, dialog independence in user interface (UI) design, methodology to follow in a development team. These factors are not easy to conciliate, forcing designers to make trade offs or unbalanced choices. In this paper, we discuss an architecture model, which is part of TRIDENT project, that addresses these issues. It consists of a generic architecture model for highly interactive business oriented applications. It is accompanied with a practical task-based methodology for building an architecture that automatically preserves desired criteria. Assumptions made for the architecture model, its content and the semantics of relationships are explained. The systematic approach is exemplified by a complete architecture case throughout the paper. Software Architecture Analysis Method (SAAM) is finally applied to prove the benefits of this architecture and to evaluate it with respect to relevant criteria. This paper suggest first steps towards a systematic building of a software architecture.

Towards a dynamic strategy for computer-aided visual placement

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 two-column 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.

On the problem of selecting interaction objects

This paper examines, gathers, and reviews global knowledge about selection rules for choosing interaction objects. This analysis allows to define: (i) the premisses of selection rules in terms of attributes from an object-oriented data model, (ii) the conclusions in terms of abstract interaction objects from an object-oriented model, and (iii) a generalized definition of selection rules. It finally endeavours to provide a more complete set of selection rules for elementary, composite, and specific data.

Architecture Elements for Highly-Interactive Business-Oriented Applications

It is now widely recognized that powerful architecture elements are needed for implementing highly-interactive business-oriented applications during at least two stages of the whole lifecycle, namely the specification and the design. In this paper, we deal with the architecture model of the TRIDENT project, which introduces three components: the semantic core component, the dialog component and the presentation component. This is a hierarchical object-oriented architecture relying on the use of three kinds of objects: application objects, dialog objects, and interaction objects. Specification and rule languages are given for developing the dialog component. An abstract data model is used for characterizing the application objects. Selection rules are given for choosing appropriate interaction objects for the presentation component according to the abstract data model and to the user level.

Computer-Aided Window Identification in Trident

Multi-windowing capabilities of modern graphical workstations and personal computers provide fundamental features which are necessary to achieve a usable user interface (UI). This usability depends heavily on judicious application of these capabilities. Modifiable variables include reliance on task analysis, respect of guidelines, respect of ergonomic criteria. The problem of correct window identification is therefore crucial in this context. After reviewing the state of the art, this paper examines how windows can be identified in a computer-aided fashion in TRIDENT. The use of an Activity Chaining Graph (ACG), resulting from task analysis, is one of the basic assumptions of this project. Theoretical elements for formalizing UI presentation are defined with respect to this ACG. Then, a complete methodological approach using these elements is provided, consisting of: · an identification of presentation units for each interactive task leading to five types of window identification; · an identification of windows for each presentation unit: according to interaction styles and priorities, a particular type of window identification is retained and applied algorithmically to obtain windows of first rank; these windows become higher rank windows when they are aggregated by techniques to be applied if specific criteria are satisfied.

Expressing guidelines into an ergonomical styleguide for highly interactive applications

Various forms of guidelines for user-interface design abound in the current literature, but suffer of many drawbacks (dissemination, incompleteness, lack of qualification, lack of unifonnization, desuetude, difficulty to use). As an attempt to palliate these inconveniences, an unified view of guidelines is introduced in a corpus ergonomics, a polyvalent ergonomical styleguide for highly-interactive applications.

Visual layout techniques in multimedia applications

The aim of this work is to explore and illustrate how techniques for visual communication can serve for laying out interaction and interactive objects in multimedia applications. These techniques have been extracted from visual literacy in order to be adapted to the area of multimedia applications. These applications are generally known and designed for their great feedback and power of interaction between simple interaction objects (e.g. list boxes, radio buttons, push buttons) and interactive objects (e.g. text, image, picture, video motion). Thirty groups of techniques are introduced by defining their opposites on a continuum. Combination of these techniques can provide a patiicular multimedia layout style as encountered in visual arts. To prove that such visual layout techniques are affordable, several examples are given, compared and discussed. INTRODUCTION The problem of laying out interaction objects in traditional applications (e.g. with alphanumeric or graphical user-interfaces) is a well known and relatively well solved pro

Guidelines for Choosing Interaction Objects

Every designer faces the problem of choosing appropriate interaction objects when designing a human-computer interface. This should depend on the user capabilities, the data model and the target environment. Because the designer must rely on the experience and because there exists no way to assess that presentation consistency of the user-interfacefe is preserved, research results are presented as explicit selection rules.