James D. Foley

The art of natural graphic man—Machine conversation

The design of interactive graphic systems whose aim is good symbiosis between man and machine involves numerous factors. Many of those factors can be judged from the perspective of natural spoken conversation between two people. Guiding rules and principles for design of such systems are presented as a framework for a survey of design techniques for man-machine conversation. Attention is especially focused on ideas of action syntax structuring, logical equivalences among action devices, and avoidance of psychological blocks to communication.

Evaluating a Web Lecture Intervention in a Human–Computer Interaction Course

Research using Web lectures to enhance the classroom learning experience in an introductory human-computer interaction course is presented. By using Web lectures to present lecture material before class, more in-class time can be spent engaging students with hands-on learning activities-using class time for more learning by doing, less learning by listening. A quasi-experiment was conducted over a 15-week semester with 46 students in two sections of the same course-one section using Web lectures and one using traditional lectures. Many control measures were in place, including each section being taught by the same instructor and blind grading being used. The Web lecture sections grades were significantly higher than the traditional lecture section, and Web lecture students reported increasingly strong positive attitudes about the intervention. The twofold contribution of this work is a novel use of existing technology to improve learning and a longitudinal, quasi-experimental evaluation of its use in context

Visualizing the World-Wide Web with the navigational view builder

Abstract Overview diagrams are one of the best tools for orientation and navigation in hypermedia systems. However, constructing effective overview diagrams is a challenging task. This paper describes the Navigational View Builder, a tool which allows the user to interactively create useful visualizations of the information space. It uses four strategies to form effective views. These are binding, clustering, filtering and hierarchization. These strategies use a combination of structural and content analysis of the underlying space for forming the visualizations. This paper discusses these strategies and shows how they can be applied for forming visualizations for the World-Wide Web.

A second generation user interface design environment: the model and the runtime architecture

Several obstacles exist in the user interface design process which distract a developer from designing a good user interface. One of the problems is the lack of an application model to keep the designer in perspective with the application. The other problem is having to deal with massive user interface programming to achieve a desired interface and to provide users with correct help information on the interface. In this paper, we discuss an application model which captures information about the application to specifications of a desired interface. The application model is then used to control the dialogues at runtime and can be used by a help component to automatically generate animated and textual help. Specification changes in the application model will automatically result in behavioral changes in the interface.

Visualizing complex hypermedia networks through multiple hierarchical views

Our work concerns visualizing the information space of hypermedia systems using multiple hierarchical views. Although overview diagrams are useful for helping the user to navigate in a hypermedia system, for any real-world system they become too complicated and large to be really useful. This is because these diagrams represent complex network structures which are very difficult to visualize and comprehend. On the other hand, effective visualizations of hierarchies have been developed. Our strategy is to provide the user with different hierarchies, each giving a different perspective to the underlying information space, to help the user better comprehend the information. We propose an algorithm based on content and structural analysis to form hierarchies from hypermedia networks. The algorithm is automatic but can be guided by the user. The multiple hierarchies can be visualized in various ways. We give examples of the implementation of the algorithm on two hypermedia systems.

Coupling a UI framework with automatic generation of context-sensitive animated help

Animated help can assist users in understanding how to use computer application interfaces. An animated help facility integrated into a runtime user interface support tool requires information pertaining to user interfaces, the applications being supported, the relationships between interface and application and precise detailed information sufficient for accurate illustrations of interface components. This paper presents aknowledge model developed to support such an animated help facility. Continuing our research efforts towards automatic generation of user interfaces from specifications, a framework has been developed to utilize one knowledge model to automatically generate animated help at runtime and to assist the management of user interfaces. Cartoonist is a system implemented based on the framework. Without the help facility, Cartoonist functions as a knowledge-driven user interface. With the help facility added to Cartoonist’s user interface architecture, we demonstrate how animation of user’s actions can be simulated by superimposing animation on the actual interface. The animation sequences imitate user actionsandCartoonist’s user interface dialogue controller responds to animation “inputs”exactly as if they were from a user. The user interface runtime information managed by Cartoonist is shared with the help facility to furnish animation scenarios and to vary scenarios to suit the current user context. The Animator and the UI controller are modeled so that the Animator incorporates what is essential to the animation task and the UI controller assumes responsibility of the rest of the interactions an approach which maintains consistency between help animation and the actual user interface.

Coupling application design and user interface design

Building an interactive application involves the design of both a data model and a graphical user interface (GUI) to present that model to the user. These two design activities are typically approached as separate tasks and are frequently undertaken by different individuals or groups. Our apporach eliminated redundant specification work by generating an interface directly from the data model itself. An inference engine using style rules for selecting and placing GUI controls (i.e., widgets) is integrated with an interface design tool to generate a user interface definition. This approach allows a single data model to be mapped onto multiple GUIs by substituting the appropriate rule set and thus represents a step toward a GUI-independent run-time layout facility.

Providing high-level control and expert assistance in the user interface presentation design

Current user interface builders provide only low-level assistance, because they have knowledge of neither the application, nor the principles by which interface elements are combined effectively. We have developed a framework that unites the knowledge components essential for effective user interface presentation design. The framework consists of an application model (both a data model and a control model), a design process model that supports top-down iterative development, and graphic design knowledge that is used both to place dialog box elements such that their application dependent logical relationships are visually reinforced and to control design symmetry and balance. To demonstrate the frameworks viability, we have constructed a tool based on encapsulated design knowledge that establishes high-level style preferences and provides expert assistance for the dialog box presentation design and menu structuring.

Defining interfaces at a high level of abstraction

One of the newest user-interface management systems, the User-Interface Development Environment, is described by its creators. UIDE is built around a knowledge-based representation of the conceptual design of a user interface. UIDE supports design at a high-level specification of the interface from information provided by the designer. By using the same knowledge base, the interface developer can generate a new interface design with the same functionality as the original design. This lets users try many functionally equivalent interfaces for the same application.<<ETX>>

DON: user interface presentation design assistant

We describe a design tool, DON, which assists user interface designers in generating menu and dialog box presentations. An integrated knowledge base model serves as the foundation for developing thesetofdesignrulestoautomatevariousactivitiesofthe designprccess.Usefulandreusableknowledgeabouttheorganization of menus and dialog boxes is identified andencapsulated in the form of design rules. The basic approach we take is embedding a top-down design methodology in a tool that assists designers in organizing the information, selecting appropriate interface object classes and their attributes, and placing selected interface objects in a dialog box or a menu in a meaningful, logical, and consistent manner. We let the designer specify the conceptual design of an application, maintain high-level style preference profiles, customize the appearances of interface object classes whichmakeup aninterface presentation. and controlthepriority of organizationrules. The tool then automatically generates the user interface presentation. INTRODUCTION A user interface management system (UIMS) provides a framework for producing quality interfaces faster and easier. The high cost of trying out interface designs to accommodate varying styles and preferences makes developing interfaces very difficult without design tools which speed up the process. Bottom-up interface building tools provide interactive ways to create, compose, and modify the objects which make up the user interfaces. Interface building tools like Trillium [Henderson 861, the dialog editor [Cardelli 881, Interviews [Linton 891, Prototyper [Cossey 89],theExperInterfaceBuilder[Hullot87],andTransportable Application Executive (TAE Plus) [ Szczur 881, are very effective in speeding up the iterative development cycle, but do not guide and assist the designer in choosing and organizing interface objects. Thesebottom-updesigntoolsreduceinitialcreationtimeandfacilitate modifying visual attributes, and some provide graphical constraints to assist in laying out interface objects. Difficulties arise when a designer tries to reorganize the content or to change the application objecttointerfaceobjectmappingwhenknowledgeoflinksbetween applicationknowledgeandtheinteractively laid-outinterfaceobjects Permission to copy without fee all or part of this matertial 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 the copying is by permission of the Association for Computing Machinery. To copy otherwise, or to republish, requires a fee and/or specific permission. @ 1990 ACM 0897914104/90/0010/0010