Erschienen in: ERCIM news ; (1993), 15. - S. 16
IOA:
User Interface
Design ·
·Assistance
by tlarald Relterer
'fhe IDA (User Interface Design Assistance) project has been started jn
the ~MD- Institute for Applied In~
formation Technology. The goaloftbis
project is to develop computer b~sed
desi~n aid tools for a humal\factor
basecl user interface design.
ences in the field of Human-Computer ·
Interaction are the basis for constructing
new design principles and guidelines for
innovative user interfaces. The human
factors knowledge is summarised in a
"Human Factors Style Guide", which is
the foundation for the computer supported design aid tools.
environment (UIDE) and an a,pplicatipn
development environment (ADE). The
IDA project concentrates on tools and.facilities that are unique to t he UIDE.
Today commercial UIDE normally includes only tools for specifyi ng user interfaces and in some innova tive UIDE
you can also find libraries with limited
use. In IDA we present some ideas how
The following design aid tools are under we can reach a real UIDE including sodevelopment in the IDA project:
phisticatedlibraries of reusabl e software
• A composition too/ to construct inno- (composition tool), guideline s and advative user interfl\ces; based on a li- visers (advice and explanation tool) and
brary of interaction objects and. di;:t- tools for evaluating user interfaces (ql,lallogue scripts.
·
. ity assurance tool). We called ourtools
• An advice too/ to presen:t the human design aid tools, because their primary
·factors knowiedge; ·b ased on hyper- focus is not to support the l;lesign process
(like editors) but to give the desigriers
media documents, a library ofinteracsome
advice and. evaluation during the
tlon objects and an expert sysfem . .
design process. We are.sure that with the
• A quality assurance too/ to evaluate the help of such design aid tools the aim '.'to
confonnance of the user interface with . construct more us.able inncivative user inthe human factors knowledge; based terfaces" could be reached.
on an expert system .
·
··.· ·~ : .
The increasing importance of human factors baseduser interface design, the Iack
of human factors knowledge of the de~
signers and the availability of new user
interface design tools were starting poi.nts
Piease contact: Harald Relterer • GMD
for the IDA project. Th.e objective of this Ttie GMD statting cooperation with Tel: +49 .224114-2729
project is to develop desigit aid tools for · some compariies to construct the qesigil E-mail: relterer@gmd.de
a human factor based user interface de- aid tools for specific application domains~
sign. Th~se desigh aid tools are intemted For this purpose some workshops with
in a UIMS to support the designers of in- members of companies, which are denovative user interfaces (e.g. object- veloping Software applicätiöns and memoriented gi:aphical inteifaces; 3-D user bers of companie·s ~ which are developinterfaces; hypennedili user interfaces) ing UIMS were arranged. In the realistic
during the development process; The aim context of such application domains the
is to impart human factörs knowledgc for usefulness and usability of the design aid
innovative userinterfac~s to the.desigii- tools will be evaluated; lt's clear that the
ers. Therefore the designers .should have. user interface design has to be embeddireet access to the human factors know- ded in the software development lifeledge from their development tool. The cycle. Today a Iot of methods and tools
presentati 0p of theßesign knowledge is : for the application development are availbased on object-oriented, multimedia and able. There are also some Special methods for the user interface development.
knowledge-base,d techniques.
Till now little work has been done to inAn important pre-condition for develop- tegrate methods of applicationdeveloping computer based design aid tools is to ment and user interface development. We
fonnaUse human factors knowledge to think that the new object-oriei:ited
allow a co~puter based presentation; Es- paradigm offers a good chance fot such
.pecially in the area of graphical user in- an integration. This assumption is based
ter{aces the GMD Human-Computer In- on the fact, that modern graphical user
teraciion Research Division has a deep interfaces (GUI~i) also use the objectunderstanding of the necessary design oriented paradigm (e.g. X-ToolJdt). The
pdnciples and design guidelities, the rel- aim should be to come to one general
evant international Standards, the avail- method for the whole development proable style guides ~d the construction and cess. Therefore we are planriing to inteuse of evaluation titethods for usability grale the use of the design aid tools in a:n
testing. the area of 3-D and hypenne- object-oriented developmerit Iife-cych~.
dia user intei'face!> the Human-Computer Interaction Research Division is doing In the future a software developme!'lt en"
much R&D activities. The results of these , vironnient (e.g. CASE Tocil) should'con• ·
R&D 11ctivities and the available experi- tain both, a user interface development
....
is
In
16
Konstanzer Online-Publikations-System (KOPS)
URL: http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bsz:352-252006