Model-based automation of the design of user interfaces to digitalcontrol systems

Digital control systems, like those controlling the functions of buildings or industrial processes, pose a number of special problems for good user interface design. The general problems of providing usability, common to all systems, include difficulty in accessing and applying principles of good design. In addition, digital control systems can have multiple users, with multiple roles, and each installation has different configurations of systems, controls, and user interface devices. Providing interactions for the users of building control systems is often achieved by manually implementing each required display. This is an expensive solution, which often produces less than optimal results. We address these problems through the automation of user interface design. Our solution, called DIGBE (dynamic interface generation for building environments), separates the domain knowledge, interaction design, and presentation heuristics into multiple collaborating models. Each model contains knowledge about a particular aspect of interface design, and uses this knowledge to dynamically create each user interface that is needed to support the users of a control system. DIGBE demonstrates that it is possible to automatically and dynamically create consistent and individualized user interfaces from model-based design knowledge     

IFS: a tool to build application systems

The interpretive frame system (IFS), a tool for building application systems, is presented. IFS separates high-level design and user-interface programming from domain-specific programming. It offers a language suitable for implementing systems of interconnected tasks, simplifies the construction of sophisticated but easy-to-use user interfaces, and increases tool reuse in system construction. A system built with IFs is called a frame system, and it consists of four layers-the user interface, system structure, computational functions, and data architecture-which are described. The IFS language and programming environment are also described. A programming example is given. Reuse and prototyping are discussed     

Defining interfaces at a high level of abstraction

One of the newest user-interface management systems, the User-Interface Development Environment, is described by its creators. UIDE is built around a knowledge-based representation of the conceptual design of a user interface. UIDE supports design at a high-level specification of the interface from information provided by the designer. By using the same knowledge base, the interface developer can generate a new interface design with the same functionality as the original design. This lets users try many functionally equivalent interfaces for the same application     

Teleoperation User Interfaces for Mining Robotics

This paper presents a brief discussion of the requirements for user interfaces for teleoperation of mining vehicles and systems. Current commercial interfaces are relatively simple, evolving from line-of-sight remote control systems with the addition of video displays. This level of sophistication has nonetheless allowed teleoperation to be a viable and profitable technique. CSIRO Exploration and Mining research into interface design currently concentrates on fusion of non-visual feedback to the operator and efficient presentation of such information. Case studies based on user interfaces for two experimental teleoperated mining-related systems, the Numbat mine emergency response vehicle and remote highwall mining control systems are described. In both cases the purpose of the user interface is to satisfy the major client requirements for mining systems of robustness, reliability and ease of use by site operational and support personnel.     

Design of user-interface without automation surprises for discrete event systems

In human-machine systems, a user predicts the behavior of a machine using partial or abstracted information provided by a user-interface. If the user-interface does not provide sufficient information as required by the user, then the system does not always behave as the user anticipates. Such insufficient information and the consequent discrepancy tend to result in an automation surprise. Thus, the user-interface should be suitably designed so that the user can interact with the automated system safely and reliably. Moreover, a more simplified representation of the underlying system is required in order to reduce the complexity of operation. In the present paper, we consider coordinated actions between a user and a machine through a user-interface, where both the user's actions and the machine's behavior are modeled by discrete event systems. First, automation surprises are classified into three cases: a blocking state, a mode confusion, and a refusal state from the viewpoint of discrete event system theory. Next, the necessary and sufficient conditions for the nonexistence of the automation surprises are derived. The conditions are based on simulation and bisimulation relations between the machine model and the user model. Subsequently, we show that a user-interface and a user model without automation surprises can be designed by utilizing the bisimulation algorithm. Finally, the proposed approach is applied to a model of heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems in order to illustrate the design procedure of human–machine systems without automation surprises.     

Requirements for graphical user interface development environments for groupware

Most user interface designers are conversant with graphical user interface (GUI) tools such as Motif¹ and Presentation Manager² which provide ‘widgets’ and other facilities for building user interfaces. Such GUI tools were developed primarily for building interfaces to single-user systems. The purpose of the paper is to present the result of research into the requirements for GUI tools for multi-user systems. Many of the requirements of single and multi-user GUIs are the same, for example, usability and flexibility. A number of new widgets are needed for multi-user GUIs, for example, shared scroll-bars and multi-user telepointers. The requirements are divided into three groups based on three sources of requirements: literature, user survey and widgets.     

Managing Information in a Co-operative Object Database System

The paper describes a software infrastructure that was built to manage information in a co-operative environment for the design of control systems. The architecture of the environment, the organization of the design database and a suite of information management tools are presented. The paper suggests that the distributed client–server architecture and object database technology meet the requirements of managing information in the environment. The following issues related to information management are examined in more detail: support for version control, maintenance of information integrity by means of object access control and consistency control, support for user co-operation based on object sharing and change notification, graphical user interfaces, and design tool interfaces. Problems encountered during the implementation of the environment using a commercial object database management system are also discussed.     

Garnet: comprehensive support for graphical, highly interactiveuser interfaces

The Garnet research project, which is creating a set of tools to aid the design and implementation of highly interactive, graphical, direct-manipulation user interfaces, is discussed. Garnet also helps designers rapidly develop prototypes for different interfaces and explore various user-interface metaphors during early product design. It emphasizes easy specification of object behavior, often by demonstration and without programming. Garnet contains a number of different components grouped into two layers. The Garnet Toolkit (the lower layer) supplies the object-oriented graphics system and constraints, a set of techniques for specifying the objects' interactive behavior in response to the input devices, and a collection of interaction techniques. On top of the Garnet Toolkit layer are a number of tools to make creating user interfaces easier. The components of both layers are described     

Lessons learned from the design and evaluation of visual information-seeking systems

Designing information-seeking systems has become an increasingly complex task as today’s information spaces are rapidly growing in quantity, heterogeneity, and dimensionality. The challenge is to provide user interfaces that have a satisfying usability and user experience even for novice users. Although information visualization and interaction design offer solutions, many information-seeking systems such as online catalogs for libraries or web search engines continue to use outdated user-interface concepts developed decades ago. In this paper, we will present four principles that we identified as crucial for the successful design of a modern visual information-seeking system. These are (1) to support various ways of formulating an information need, (2) to integrate analytical and browsing-oriented ways of exploration, (3) to provide views on different dimensions of the information space, and (4) to make search a pleasurable experience. These design principles are based on our experience over a long period in the user-centered design and evaluation of visual information-seeking systems. Accordingly, we will showcase individual designs from our own work of the past 10 years to illustrate each principle and hence narrow the gap between the scientific discussion and the designing practitioner that has often hindered research ideas from becoming reality. However, most of the times search is only one part of a higher level user activity (e.g. writing a paper). Thus future research should focus on the challenges when regarding search in such a broader context. We will use the final two chapters to point out some of these challenges and outline our vision of an integrated and consistent digital work environment named Zoomable Object-oriented Information Landscape.     

A graphical specification system for user-interface design

An environment for creating user interfaces for embedded systems, called the graphical specification system (GSS), is presented. GSS combines graphical and minimal low-level textual specification with a prototyping capability for rapid user-interface design and evaluation. It is part of a larger embedded systems project at Lockheed, called Express. The user interface components, display components, user-machine interaction, interface-application interaction, and executive component are discussed. Two scenarios, developed with GSS tool prototypes, demonstrate how some GSS tools function. One is the construction of a display with two pairs of gauges, one Cartesian and one polar. The other is the design of a display for submarine tracking     

Knowledge acquisition and interface design

Describes tools, techniques, and concepts to optimize user interfaces. The best way to ensure that a software system is friendly and works is to base it on the intended users' mental models (how they view the world), knowledge structures (what they know and how they have organized it), and work processes. The author uses a team of engineers to systematically acquire and analyze user and domain knowledge and to translate that knowledge into user-interface design decisions. This front-end analysis method, combined with knowledge-acquisition techniques, lets one build user-centered systems     

A proposed ontology to support the hardware design of building inspection robot systems

Due to the growing number of architecturally complex buildings built in recent decades, mobile building inspection robot systems are required to operate in increasingly complex environments. This leads to higher requirements for their hardware design. The existing literature on the design of building inspection robots has implicitly mentioned the impact of building environments and building defects on defining robot hardware design requirements. However, the explicit representation of what information is required to define a specific hardware requirement is stimissing. To fill this gap, this paper presents an ontology that provides an overview of the building and inspection domain objects that affect the determination of robot hardware design requirements (RoboDesign). It also explores the relationship between specific robot hardware requirements and features of complex buildings and their defects. The RoboDesign ontology integrates two main domain ontology models including a Robot System Model and a Building and Defect Model. A content evaluation and an automated consistency checking are conducted for the internal evaluation of the ontology. Additionally, the proposed ontology is implemented in two wall-climbing inspection robot design cases to check if the investigation of the robot’s application environment is comprehensive. The validation results also demonstrate that the use of the proposed ontological model allows to efficiently retrieve information required to determine a particular hardware requirement.     

Bringing context-aware access to the web through spoken interaction

The web has become the largest repository of multimedia information and its convergence with telecommunications is now bringing the benefits of web technology to hand-held devices. To optimize data access using these devices and provide services which meet the user needs through intelligent information retrieval, the system must sense and interpret the user environment and the communication context. In addition, natural spoken conversation with handheld devices makes possible the use of these applications in environments in which the use of GUI interfaces is not effective, provides a more natural human-computer interaction, and facilitates access to the web for people with visual or motor disabilities, allowing their integration and the elimination of barriers to Internet access. In this paper, we present an architecture for the design of context-aware systems that use speech to access web services. Our contribution focuses specifically on the use of context information to improve the effectiveness of providing web services by using a spoken dialog system for the user-system interaction. We also describe an application of our proposal to develop a context-aware railway information system, and provide a detailed evaluation of the influence of the context information in the quality of the services that are supplied.     

基于MVC模式的Web用户界面建模

分析了企业信息系统的Web用户界面开发特性,研究了当前主流前端框架的MVC(模型-视图-控制器)设计模式应用,针对Web前端开发需求及最佳实践方法,提出了一种符合MVC用户界面开发最佳实践的组件化Web用户界面建模方法.设计一套抽象和描述Web用户界面组件的UML(统一建模语言)概要文件,从界面数据模型、界面组件模型到界面交互模型等3个方面完成Web用户界面建模.以一个装修行业定制型ERP(企业资源计划)系统为例,通过用户界面建模实践,验证了本建模方法的可行性、易用性和有效性.     

Task-specific information retrieval systems for software engineers

This paper discusses the development of task-specific information retrieval systems for software engineers. We discuss how software engineers interact with information and information retrieval systems and investigate to what extent a domain-specific search and recommendation system can be developed in order to support their work related activities. We have conducted a user study which is based on the “Cognitive Research Framework” to identify the relation between the information objects used during the code development (code snippets and search queries), the tasks users engage in and the associated use of search interfaces. Based on our user studies, a questionnaire and an automated observation of user interactions with the browser and software development environment, we identify that software engineers engage in a finite number of work related tasks and they also develop a finite number of “work practices”/“archetypes of behaviour”. Secondly we identify a group of domain specific behaviours that can successfully be used as a source of strong implicit relevance feedback. Based on our results, we design a snippet recommendation interface, and a code related recommendation interface which are embedded within the standard search engine.     

A visual tool for user-interface development

VITUID is a visual tool for user interface development. It aims to help user-interface designers, who may be non-programmers, to specify and create interactive, graphical user interfaces through graphical interaction. VITUID lets designers specify the user command set and the human-computer dialogs by building a tree and specifying the behavior of each dialog via a dialog-control word, adopting the object-oriented approach. The main strategy of VITUID is to separate a user interface into an application-dependent part and an application-independent part and then let the designer specify only the application-dependent part.     

Widgets Dedicated to User Interface Evaluation

In this article, evaluation-based widgets are proposed as a contribution to assist evaluators for early evaluation of user interfaces. This contribution imbricates the ergonomic quality evaluation process into widgets used for user-interface graphical composition. In other words, these widgets evaluate themselves according to a defined set of ergonomic guidelines. The proposed widgets indicate the possible interface design ergonomic inconsistencies as a notification to the designer. The guidelines set can be modified through an interface dedicated to guidelines definition into XML files. The proposed widgets are intended for the evaluation of different kind of user interfaces: WIMP, web, and mobile. An experimental evaluation, involving these evaluation-based widgets, is proposed to illustrate and to validate the approach.     

TADEUS: seamless development of task-based and user-orientedinterfaces

Task-based and user-oriented user interfaces utilize knowledge about user tasks and user characteristics to the utmost extent. They support users throughout their work flows, and must be constructed by a development process that avoids loss of application context and involves user feedback, from requirements specification to code generation. The concepts behind the task analysis/design/end users systems (TADEUS) approach to enable seamless task-based development are a semantically rich representation scheme, a model-driven development procedure, a diagrammatic notation and unifying specification scheme. Thus, interactive applications can be developed seamlessly. Specifications comprise problem domain knowledge, work processes, user roles and personal profiles, as well as interaction modalities (required for task accomplishment). For user-interface prototyping the TADEUS environment contains a model interpreter that executes structure and behavior specifications. This way, early feedback on task-based portals can be provided by users. In this paper we detail the latest developments in the TADEUS project when implementing a work-process based usability life cycle. We review the underlying methodology and the features of the TADEUS environment, in order to demonstrate the benefits for developers and users resulting of smooth transition support for and between the different stages of development     

Evolutionary design of user interfaces for workflow information systems

In this paper we argue that user interface design should evolve from iterative to evolutionary in order to support the user interface development life cycle in a more flexible way. Evolutionary design consists of taking any input that informs to the lifecycle at any level of abstraction and its propagation through inferior and superior levels (vertical engineering) as well as the same level (horizontal engineering). This lifecycle is particularly appropriate when requirements are incomplete, partially unknown or to be discovered progressively. We exemplify this lifecycle by a methodology for developing user interfaces of workflow information systems. The methodology involves several models (i.e., task, process, workflow, domain, context of use) and steps. The methodology applies model-driven engineering to derive concrete user interfaces from a workflow model imported into a workflow management system in order to run the workflow. Instead of completing each model step by step, any model element is either derived from early requirements or collected in the appropriate model before being propagated in the subsequent steps. When more requirements are elicited, any new element is added at the appropriate level, consolidated with the already existing elements, and propagated to the subsequent levels. A workflow editor has been developed to support the methodology.