Automating the Lexical and Syntactic Design of Graphical User Interfaces: The UofA UIMS

Abstract

The primary goal of the UofA* UIMS is to address a key problem with UIMSS:their inability to help in the initial design of user interfaces, Because of this inability, most existing UIMSS require the interface designer to work with low level syntactic and lexical detail, which can be very time-consuming and expensive in terms of effort required. The UofA* approach to this problem is to produce the initial design specification and implementation of the user interface automaticallyy, and then enable the interface designer to improve its appearance and effectiveness through an interactive refinement process, The interface designer, in this approach, works at the conceptual and semantic levels of the user interface and produces a high-level description of the commands the interface is to support. Based on this description the syntactic and lexical levels of the interface are automatically designed and implemented. This interface can be refined by the designer to improve the resulting interaction with the user. The UofA* UIMS facilitates exploration in interface design by using user�s preferences and designer�s guidelines as optional inputs. It allows the creation of interfaces in which many different types of syntaxes can coexist. © 1991, ACM. All rights reserved.