User interface

About: User interface is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 85402 publications have been published within this topic receiving 1728377 citations. The topic is also known as: UI & input method.

Designing for Interaction: Creating Innovative Applications and Devices

Abstract: Building products and services that people interact with is the big challenge of the 21st century. Dan Saffer has done an amazing job synthesizing the chaos into an understandable, ordered reference that is a bookshelf must-have for anyone thinking of creating new designs. Jared Spool, CEO of User Interface EngineeringInteraction design is all around us. If youve ever wondered why your mobile phone looks pretty but doesnt work well, youve confronted bad interaction design. But if youve ever marveled at the joy of using an iPhone, shared your photos on Flickr, used an ATM machine, recorded a television show on TiVo, or ordered a movie off Netflix, youve encountered good interaction design: products that work as well as they look. Interaction design is the new field that defines how our interactive products behave. Between the technology that powers our devices and the visual and industrial design that creates the products aesthetics lies the practice that figures out how to make our products useful, usable, and desirable.This thought-provoking new edition of Designing for Interaction offers the perspective of one of the most respected experts in the field, Dan Saffer. This book will help youlearn to create a design strategy that differentiates your product from the competitionuse design research to uncover peoples behaviors, motivations, and goals in order to design for thememploy brainstorming best practices to create innovativenew products and solutionsunderstand the process and methods used to define product behaviorIt also offers interviews and case studies from industry leaders on prototyping, designing in an Agile environment, service design, ubicomp, robots, and more.

User interface for displaying selectable software functionality controls that are contextually relevant to a selected object

Abstract: An improved user interface is provided for displaying selectable functionality controls that identifies the context of the object to which the user interface is relevant, which contains rich functionality controls for applying contextually relevant functionality to a selected object, and which may be efficiently switched to a different context for applying a different set of functionalities to a different or neighboring editable object. A context menu of functionalities is displayed adjacent to a selected object where the menu of functionalities includes functionalities associated with editing the selected object. The context menu includes an identification of the object context and a control for selectively changing the context and associated functionalities of the menu to a different object context for displaying a different set of functionalities associated with the different context.

Portable computing device-integrated appliance

Abstract: In accordance with one aspect, a portable computing device determines a type of an appliance in which the portable computing device is docked. The portable computing device identifies, based on the type of the appliance, a user interface configuration for the portable computing device, and configures the user interface of the portable computing device in accordance with the identified user interface configuration. In accordance with another aspect, a car stereo includes a docking station into which an off-the-shelf handheld computer can be docked. The car stereo also includes an input/output (I/O) component that allows the car stereo to communicate with the handheld computer when the handheld computer is docked in the docking station of the car stereo. In accordance with another aspect, an appliance in which a portable computing device can be docked is an integrated vehicle stereo and portable computing device docking station.

Constraint satisfaction and debugging for interactive user interfaces

Abstract: Many user interface toolkits use constraint solvers to maintain geometric relationships between graphic objects, or to connect the graphics to the application data structures. One efficient and flexible technique for maintaining constraints is multi-way local propagation, where constraints are represented by sets of method procedures. This dissertation examines the use of local propagation constraint solvers in user interface toolkits, and presents three new systems: (1) The SkyBlue constraint solver. SkyBlue is an incremental constraint solver that uses local propagation to maintain a set of constraints as individual constraints are added and removed. If all of the constraints cannot be satisfied, SkyBlue leaves weaker constraints unsatisfied in order to satisfy stronger constraints (maintaining a constraint hierarchy). SkyBlue is a more general successor to the DeltaBlue algorithm that satisfies cycles of methods by calling external cycle solvers and supports multi-output methods. These features make SkyBlue more useful for constructing user interfaces, since cycles of constraints can occur frequently in user interface applications and multi-output methods are necessary to represent some useful constraints. (2) The Multi-Garnet user interface development system. Garnet is a user interface toolkit that incorporates a constraint solver to maintain one-way constraints between object fields: any object field can have an associated formula to calculate its value from other object fields. The Multi-Garnet package extends Garnet to support multi-way constraints and constraint hierarchies. It integrates the SkyBlue solver into the Garnet object system, allowing programmers to create and use constraints without explicitly accessing the constraint solver. Multi-Garnet has been used to construct complex user interfaces that would have been difficult to construct just using Garnet's constraint solver. (3) The CNV user interface builder and debugger. Programmers need tools to examine the behavior of large constraint networks, just as they need such tools when debugging imperative programs. The CNV user interface builder includes a set of debugging tools to help programmers understand the behavior of complex constraint networks. One tool uses a new algorithm to generate alternate constraint solutions that would have been produced if SkyBlue had chosen different methods to satisfy the constraints.

Systems and methods for implementing multi-application tabs and tab sets

Abstract: A sharing model enables users to easily and conveniently create and share standard and custom database objects, and applications, among users or groups of users. The sharing model includes systems and methods that allow users to conveniently create and customize tabs and tab sets that define relationships between custom objects and fields, standard objects and fields, and applications. A tab visually represents a user interface into an element of an application or into a database object. Selection of a tab provides a user access to the object or element of the application represented by the tab. A tab set is a group of related tabs that work as a unit to provide application functionality. New tabs and tab sets may be defined and tab set views may be customized so that an end user can easily and conveniently switch between the various objects and application elements represented by the displayed tabs and tab set views.