Journal ArticleDOI
Past, present, and future of user interface software tools
TLDR
This article considers cases of both success and failure in past user interface tools, and extracts a set of themes which can serve as lessons for future work.Abstract:
A user interface software tool helps developers design and implement the user interface. Research on past tools has had enormous impact on today's developers—virtually all applications today are built using some form of user interface tool. In this article, we consider cases of both success and failure in past user interface tools. From these cases we extract a set of themes which can serve as lessons for future work. Using these themes, past tools can be characterized by what aspects of the user interface they addressed, their threshold and ceiling, what path of least resistance they offer, how predictable they are to use, and whether they addressed a target that became irrelevant. We believe the lessons of these past themes are particularly important now, because increasingly rapid technological changes are likely to significantly change user interfaces. We are at the dawn of an era where user interfaces are about to break out of the “desktop” box where they have been stuck for the past 15 years. The next millenium will open with an increasing diversity of user interface on an increasing diversity of computerized devices. These devices include hand-held personal digital assistants (PDAs), cell phones, pages, computerized pens, computerized notepads, and various kinds of desk and wall size-computers, as well as devices in everyday objects (such as mounted on refridgerators, or even embedded in truck tires). The increased connectivity of computers, initially evidenced by the World Wide Web, but spreading also with technologies such as personal-area networks, will also have a profound effect on the user interface to computers. Another important force will be recognition-based user interfaces, especially speech, and camera-based vision systems. Other changes we see are an increasing need for 3D and end-user customization, programming, and scripting. All of these changes will require significant support from the underlying user interface sofware tools.read more
Citations
More filters
Dissertation
Providing architectural support for building context-aware applications
Anind K. Dey,Gregory D. Abowd +1 more
TL;DR: This dissertation shows how the Context Toolkit has been used as a research testbed, supporting the investigation of difficult problems in context-aware computing such as the building of high-level programming abstractions, dealing with ambiguous or inaccurate context data and controlling access to personal context.
Proceedings ArticleDOI
prefuse: a toolkit for interactive information visualization
TL;DR: Prefuse as discussed by the authors provides theoretically-motivated abstractions for the design of a wide range of visualization applications, enabling programmers to string together desired components quickly to create and customize working visualizations.
Journal ArticleDOI
Creativity support tools: accelerating discovery and innovation
TL;DR: This research investigates how designers of programming interfaces, interactive tools, and rich social environments enable more people to be more creative more often.
Proceedings ArticleDOI
MyExperience: a system for in situ tracing and capturing of user feedback on mobile phones
TL;DR: This paper presents MyExperience, a system for capturing both objective and subjective in situ data on mobile computing activities, and presents several case studies of field deployments on people's personal phones to demonstrate how MyExperience can be used effectively to understand how people use and experience mobile technology.
Book Chapter
CmapTools: A Knowledge Modeling and Sharing Environment
Alberto J. Cañas,Greg Hill,Roger Carff,Niranjan Suri,James Lott,Gloria Gomez,Thomas C. Eskridge,Mario Arroyo,Rodrigo Carvajal +8 more
TL;DR: CmapTools is a software environment developed at the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition that empowers users, individually or collaboratively, to represent their knowledge using concept maps, to share them with peers and colleagues, and to publish them.
References
More filters
Book
Usability Engineering
TL;DR: This guide to the methods of usability engineering provides cost-effective methods that will help developers improve their user interfaces immediately and shows you how to avoid the four most frequently listed reasons for delay in software projects.
Journal ArticleDOI
Some computer science issues in ubiquitous computing
TL;DR: What is new and different about the computer science in ubiquitous computing is explained, and a series of examples drawn from various subdisciplines of computer science are outlined.
Proceedings ArticleDOI
Sketchpad: a man-machine graphical communication system
TL;DR: The Sketchpad system makes it possible for a man and a computer to converse rapidly through the medium of line drawings, and opens up a new area of man-machine communication.
Journal ArticleDOI
Direct Manipulation: A Step Beyond Programming Languages
TL;DR: As I talked with enthusiasts and examined the systems they used, I began to develop a model of the features that produced such delight, and the central ideas seemed to be visibility of the object of interest; rapid, reversible, incremental actions; and replacement of complex command language syntax by direct manipulation of the objects of interest.
Proceedings ArticleDOI
Toolglass and magic lenses: the see-through interface
TL;DR: Toolglass™ widgets are new user interface tools that can appear, as though on a transparent sheet of glass, between an application and a traditional cursor, and form a see-through interface that offers many advantages over traditional controls.