Designing Visual Interfaces

xv, 273 hl

Grouping and Ordering User Interface Components

In automatically generating a user interface from a model of the target application, many factors that affect the resulting interface's quality must be considered. Any available semantic information that can improve the interface should be used. Application actions or action parameters may be related in ways that affect placement of their associated controls in dialogue boxes. Two relationships considered here are grouping and ordering. Grouped objects should appear together, possibly visually separated from other controls, and controls which have a logical sequential ordering should appear in that order. We present an algorithm for creating an ordering of controls which correctly satisfies these constraints

Coupling Application Design and User Interface Design

Building an interactive application requires, amongst other activities, the design of both a data model and a user interface. These two designs are often done separately, frequently by different individuals or groups. However, there are strong similarities between the objects, actions and attributes of the data model and those of the user interface. This means that considerable specification work has to be done twice. Our approach is to automatically generate user interface elements directly from the data model. This saves time and effort and at the same time style rules can be applied automatically to the design of the user interface. This relieves the designer of the need to be familiar with certain style rules, while at the same time creating the consistency embodied in the rules