GUIDE: Graphical User Interfaced Development Environment

GUIDE is an interactive graphical system for designing and generating graphical user interfaces. It provides flexibility to the system designer while minimizing the amount of code which the designer must write. The GUIDE methodology includes the notions of tool, task, and context. GUIDE encourages designers to tailor their systems to individual users by inclusion of user profiles, allowing different control paths based on the user\u27s characteristics. GUIDE also provides a method for invoking application routines with parameters. Parameters may be based on user inputs and are computed at invocation time. Help messages are created along with the objects to which they refer. GUIDE handles the overhead required to display help messages

Intelligent interaction in diagnostic expert systems

AbstractAdvisory systems help to improve quality in manufacturing. Such systems, however, both human and computerized, are less than perfect and frequently not welcome. Sharp separation between working and learning modes is the main reason for the apparent hostility of advisory systems. Intelligent interaction deploys computerized advisory capabilities by merging working and learning modes. We have developed a knowledge-based interactive graphic interface to a circuit pack diagnostic expert system. The graphic interface integrates both the domain knowledge (i.e. circuit pack) and the troubleshooting knowledge (i.e. diagnostic trees). Our interface dynamically changes the amount of detail presented to the user as well as the input choices that the user is allowed to make. These changes are made using knowledge-based models of the user and of the circuit pack troubleshooting domain. The resulting system, McR, instead of guiding the user by querying for input, monitors users actions, analyzes them and offers help when needed. McR is able both to advise “how-to-do-it” by reifying shallow knowledge from the deep knowledge, and to explain intelligently “how-does-it-work” by abstracting deep knowledge from the hallow knowledge, McR is used in conjunction with the STAREX expert sytem which is installed at AT&T factory

A methodology for the design and evaluation of user interfaces for interactive information systems

The definition of proposed research addressing the development and validation of a methodology for the design and evaluation of user interfaces for interactive information systems is given. The major objectives of this research are: the development of a comprehensive, objective, and generalizable methodology for the design and evaluation of user interfaces for information systems; the development of equations and/or analytical models to characterize user behavior and the performance of a designed interface; the design of a prototype system for the development and administration of user interfaces; and the design and use of controlled experiments to support the research and test/validate the proposed methodology. The proposed design methodology views the user interface as a virtual machine composed of three layers: an interactive layer, a dialogue manager layer, and an application interface layer. A command language model of user system interactions is presented because of its inherent simplicity and structured approach based on interaction events. All interaction events have a common structure based on common generic elements necessary for a successful dialogue. It is shown that, using this model, various types of interfaces could be designed and implemented to accommodate various categories of users. The implementation methodology is discussed in terms of how to store and organize the information

Formally-based tools and techniques for human-computer dialogues

With ever cheaper and more powerful technology. the proliferation of computer systems, and higher expectations of their users, the user interface is now seen as a crucial part of any interactive system. As the designers and users of interactive software have found, though, it can be both difficult and costly to create good interactive software. It is therefore appropriate to look at ways of "engineering" the interface as well as the application. which we choose to do by using the software engineering techniques of specification and prototyping. Formally specifying the user interface allows the designer to reason about its properties in the light of the many guidelines on the subject. Early availability of prototypes of the user interface allows the designer to experiment with alternative options and to elicit feedback from potential users. This thesis presents tools and techniques (collectively called SPI for specifying and prototyping the dialogues between an interactive system and its users. They are based on a formal specification and rapid prototyping method and notation called me too. and were originally designed as an extension to me too. They have also been implemented under UNIX*. thus enabling a transition from the formal specification to its implementation. *UNIX is a trademark of AT&T Bell Laboratorie

User Interface Management Systems: A Survey and a Proposed Design

The growth of interactive computing has resulted in increasingly more complex styles of interaction between user and computer. To facilitate the creation of highly interactive systems, the concept of the User Interface Management System (UIMS) has been developed. Following the definition of the term 'UIMS' and a consideration of the putative advantages of the UIMS approach, a number of User Interface Management Systems are examined. This examination focuses in turn on the run-time execution system, the specification notation and the design environment, with a view to establishing the features which an "ideal" UIMS should possess. On the basis of this examination, a proposal for the design of a new UIMS is presented, and progress reported towards the implementation of a prototype based on this design

A User Interface Management System Generator

Much recent research has been focused on user interfaces. A major advance in interface design is the User Interface Management System (UIMS), which mediates between the application and the user. Our research has resulted in a conceptual framework for interaction which permits the design and implementation of a UIMS generator system. This system, called Graphical User Interface Development Environment or GUIDE, allows an interface designer to specify interactively the user interface for an application. The major issues addressed by this methodology are making interfaces implementable, modifiable and flexible, allowing for user variability, making interfaces consistent and allowing for application diversity within a user community. The underlying goal of GUIDE is that interface designers should be able to specify interfaces as broadly as is possible with a manually-coded system. The specific goals of GUIDE are: The designer need not write any interface code. Action routines are provided by the designer or application implementator which implement the actions or operations of the application system. Action routines may have parameters. The designer is able to specify multiple control paths based on the state of the system and a profile of the user. Inclusion of help and prompt messages is as easy as possible. GUIDE\u27s own interface may be generated with GUIDE. GUIDE goes beyond previous efforts in UIMS design in the full parameter specification provided in the interface for application actions, in the ability to reference application global items in the interface, and in the pervasiveness of conditions throughout the system. A parser is built into GUIDE to parse conditions and provide type-checking. The GUIDE framework describes interfaces in terms of three components: what the user sees of the application world (user-defined pictures and user-defined picture classes) what the user can do (tasks and tools) what happens when the user does something (actions and decisions) These three are combined to form contexts which describe the state of the interface at any time

OSU : a high speed software development environment

Several problems with user interface design and implementation have been identified: (1) user interfaces are difficult and time­-consuming to design and implement; (2) most user interface management systems (UIMS) are themselves difficult to use by a programmer; (3) UIMS's have not been integrated with other tools that support structured design, coding and maintenance, thus failing to maximize programmer productivity. In the Oregon Speedcode Universe (O.S.U.) project, we had taken the following approaches: (1) direct manipulation programming technique is used to address the problems with user interface design and implementation; (2) integration of UIMS with CASE tools; and (3) high-level program generation from scripts, and reusable components. This report surveys some of the existing UIMS's and describes O.S.U., a high-speed software development system. The main emphasis of this work is the design and implementation of Structure Chart Editor in O.S.U.. The Structure Chart Editor has three unique features: 1) combination of functional decomposition with object-oriented design, 2) alternate architectural views, e.g. call graph, uses graph, object graph, and graphical display of procedures, 3) merging the user interface specification with design and coding specifications. Experimental results suggest that the techniques employed by OSU can be used to develop 50-90% of an application without explicit programming yielding 2-10 fold productivity improvements

The use of evaluation in the design and development of interactive medical record systems

An explorative study was done to develop an evaluation methodology. This method can be applied during the development of interactive medical record systems in order to provide information which can be used to improve user interaction with the system. Th e evaluation methodology consists of a number of interactive sessions with potential users of the interactive medical record system. During the first two sessions the subjects are trained to use the system. During the third and last session the subjects are videotaped while they are doing a set of benchmark tasks on the system under evaluation. The video recordings are analysed to obtain performance data. This performance data consists of task timings and a list of problems experienced (errors made) by the subjects. The systems evaluated during the study were a problem-oriented manual medical record and an interactive computerized medical record. The computerized record system was specifically developed for this study. The design and subsequent improvements to this system are documented in the study