The Vista Environment for the Coevolutionary Design of User Interfaces

User centered design requires the creation of numerous design artifacts such as task hierarchy, task-oriented specification, user interface design, architecture design and code. It is increasingly accepted that such artifacts cannot be created in isolation, but instead incrementally coevolve, where information obtained from the development of one artifact contributes to the development of the others. In user interface development, these artifacts are typically developed by different people with different backgrounds, hindering the communication necessary for coevolution. This paper demonstrates how different design artifacts can be linked, exposing their common elements. Such links can be developed despite the differing points of view and differing levels of detail of the design artifacts. This paper describes Vista, a prototype tool for examining the links between design artifacts, and demonstrates how making these links explicit supports coevolutionary design