Advanced display object selection methods for enhancing user-computer productivity

The User-Interface Technology Branch at NCCOSC RDT&E Division has been conducting a series of studies to address the suitability of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) graphic user-interface (GUI) methods for efficiency and performance in critical naval combat systems. This paper presents an advanced selection algorithm and method developed to increase user performance when making selections on tactical displays. The method has also been applied with considerable success to a variety of cursor and pointing tasks. Typical GUI's allow user selection by: (1) moving a cursor with a pointing device such as a mouse, trackball, joystick, touchscreen; and (2) placing the cursor on the object. Examples of GUI objects are the buttons, icons, folders, scroll bars, etc. used in many personal computer and workstation applications. This paper presents an improved method of selection and the theoretical basis for the significant performance gains achieved with various input devices tested. The method is applicable to all GUI styles and display sizes, and is particularly useful for selections on small screens such as notebook computers. Considering the amount of work-hours spent pointing and clicking across all styles of available graphic user-interfaces, the cost/benefit in applying this method to graphic user-interfaces is substantial, with the potential for increasing productivity across thousands of users and applications

Graphic design & ubiquitous graphic user interfaces; The Third Wave of Computing

Graphic design is an integral component of user interface design. Ubiquitous computing is the a form of computing that is everywhere all the time through technology advances in hardware, software, and communication networks. Consumers are able to retrieve and send information whenever a task needs to be completed. Graphic design is part of the visual mechanism through which people interact with devices. The visual interactive components of these devices are the part of computing systems that are addressed in this project. This thesis addresses the problems that arise when people need to interact with several devices at a given time. The goal is to make the experience of an imaging appliance as enjoyable and useful as possible. Graphic design is the key component in the visual communication aspect of these devices. The ideas used in the scenarios that are described in the ideation stage assume that future technologies are mainstream and used by the mass consumer. Although these assumptions may or may not come to fruition, graphic design will still be a integral part of that user experience

Transportable Applications Environment (TAE) Plus: A NASA tool for building and managing graphical user interfaces

The Transportable Applications Environment (TAE) Plus, developed at GSFC, is an advanced portable user interface development environment which simplifies the process of creating and managing complex application graphical user interfaces (GUI's), supports prototyping, allows applications to be ported easily between different platforms and encourages appropriate levels of user interface consistency between applications. The following topics are discussed: the capabilities of the TAE Plus tool; how the implementation has utilized state-of-the-art technologies within graphic workstations; and how it has been used both within and outside of NASA

General model of editor graphic uniterms

Застосовуючи методи декомпозиції і модифікованої алгебри алгоритмів створено й описано загальну модель редактора проектування багатотипних графічних інтерфейсів користувача інструментальних засобів комп’ютерних систем. Виконано декомпозицію за критерієм функціонального призначення підсистем. Математичну модель інструментальних засобів проектування графічних інтерфейсів користувача описано засобами модифікованої алгебри алгоритмів. Побудована математична модель програмно реалізована й апробована.A general editor model of designing graphic user interfaces tools computer systems was created and described by applying the method of decomposition and modified algebra algorithms. Decomposition has been done by the criterion of functional subsystems destination. Mathematical model of instrumental ways of designing graphic user interfaces is described by means of the modified algebra algorithms. The mathematical model is implemented and tested using programming. Modern software development systems must meet certain conditions regarding quick and efficient development of software packages and systems. Editor GUIs is one of the main parts of these systems, which should ensure graphic user's interface of computer systems tools, and which also should be most easy to use, intuitional clear and functional. Nowadays, when the functional peculiarities of websites or web projects almost are not worse than the desktop systems and despite of the fact that modern systems of developing and designing GUIs make possible to create projects and to use graphic elements (graphic uniterms of only certain types: buttons, text fields, elements of alternative and non-alternative choice, etc.), there is a problem of creating the editor, which would realise the possibility of developing only one GUI for many types of projects (editor user interfaces of computer systems). Graphic uniterms editor is a computer system of projecting graphic interfaces of computer system and providing them with functional properties. Graphic interface is characterized by an aggregate of facilities for processing and retrieving of information, maximally adapted for the user's convenience. The user's interface is implemented by a single window or multiwindow mode, change of the colour, size, visibility (transparency, translucency, invisibility) of windows and their elements, their location, sorting of window elements, flexible configuration of windows and some of their elements (files, folders, labels, fonts, etc.) in graphical systems. To build the most easy to use and optimally informative graphic interface modern graphical interface, editors are needed, with the help of which the development of graphic interface would be as quick as possible with the ability of visual location and positioning of interface elements, display and editing of all graphic interface properties as a whole and each element separately, quick display of the result of development, implementation of the graphic interface's response to user actions

Spatial issues in user interface design from a graphic design perspective

The user interface of a computer system is a visual display that provides information about the status of operations on data within the computer and control options to the user that enable adjustments to these operations. From the very beginning of computer technology the user interface was a spatial display, although its spatial features were not necessarily complex or explicitly recognized by the users. All text and nonverbal signs appeared in a virtual space generally thought of as a single flat plane of symbols. Current technology of high performance workstations permits any element of the display to appear as dynamic, multicolor, 3-D signs in a virtual 3-D space. The complexity of appearance and the user's interaction with the display provide significant challenges to the graphic designer of current and future user interfaces. In particular, spatial depiction provides many opportunities for effective communication of objects, structures, processes, navigation, selection, and manipulation. Issues are presented that are relevant to the graphic designer seeking to optimize the user interface's spatial attributes for effective visual communication

Semi-Automated SVG Programming via Direct Manipulation

Direct manipulation interfaces provide intuitive and interactive features to a broad range of users, but they often exhibit two limitations: the built-in features cannot possibly cover all use cases, and the internal representation of the content is not readily exposed. We believe that if direct manipulation interfaces were to (a) use general-purpose programs as the representation format, and (b) expose those programs to the user, then experts could customize these systems in powerful new ways and non-experts could enjoy some of the benefits of programmable systems. In recent work, we presented a prototype SVG editor called Sketch-n-Sketch that offered a step towards this vision. In that system, the user wrote a program in a general-purpose lambda-calculus to generate a graphic design and could then directly manipulate the output to indirectly change design parameters (i.e. constant literals) in the program in real-time during the manipulation. Unfortunately, the burden of programming the desired relationships rested entirely on the user. In this paper, we design and implement new features for Sketch-n-Sketch that assist in the programming process itself. Like typical direct manipulation systems, our extended Sketch-n-Sketch now provides GUI-based tools for drawing shapes, relating shapes to each other, and grouping shapes together. Unlike typical systems, however, each tool carries out the user's intention by transforming their general-purpose program. This novel, semi-automated programming workflow allows the user to rapidly create high-level, reusable abstractions in the program while at the same time retaining direct manipulation capabilities. In future work, our approach may be extended with more graphic design features or realized for other application domains.Comment: In 29th ACM User Interface Software and Technology Symposium (UIST 2016

Visual Graphic Knowledge Management Methodology

As computer technology evolves, graphic workstations are becoming more popular. They support more friendly user interfaces than do conventional terminals. The better user interfaces require more effort to develop. Therefore, many user interface (UI) design systems have been developed to facilitate the creation of modern user interfaces, but not very successfully. Many of them either provide limited features or are difficult to use. Besides, these UI design systems are actually like black boxes to their users because the underlying technology is opaque; their users cannot learn how to utilize the underlying window systems through user interface design sessions. In a sense, these systems inherently prevent the users from updating or modifying them according to their specific needs. To solve the deficiencies, a new design methodology has been invented, which is composed of three major components: visual graphic knowledge representation, automatic knowledge reuse, and automatic knowledge retrieval. In the visual graphic knowledge representation, the knowledge engineers apply the visual graphic knowledge base technology (67) (68) to preserve the domain knowledge in a set of hierarchical visual knowledge graphs, e.g. the visual graphic knowledge base. These graphs later provide knowledge base users (application designers) the dynamic visual guidance, corresponding to the progress of the design process, in the automatic knowledge reuse session. In addition to the dynamic visual guidance, the knowledge reuse process is facilitated by automatically assembling the preserved knowledge fetched from the visual graphic knowledge base. The result of the knowledge reuse is inherently represented by objects and links, which form a visual specification graph in contrast to the visual knowledge graph. This visual specification graph can be manually organized into a set of hierarchical visual specification graphs. The knowledge base users can further adapt the original knowledge base to meet the individual needs after they become familiar with the underlying window through using the knowledge base. Afterwards, the automatic knowledge retrieval is applied to automate the composition of the source code which is also retrieved from the visual graphic knowledge base. The knowledge base user then can compile and run the composed source code to yield an interactive interface