tool

Prototyping is the pivotal activity that structures innovation, collaboration, and creativity in design. Prototypes embody design hypotheses and enable designers to test them. Framin design as a thinking-by-doing activity foregrounds iteration as a central concern. This paper presents d.tools, a toolkit that embodies an iterative-design-centered approach to prototyping information appliances. This work offers contributions in three areas. First, d.tools introduces a statechart-based visual design tool that provides a low threshold for early-stage prototyping, extensible through code for higher-fidelity prototypes. Second, our research introduces three important types of hardware extensibility - at the hardware-to-PC interface, the intra-hardware communication level, and the circuit level. Third, d.tools integrates design, test, and analysis of information appliances. We have evaluated d.tools through three studies: a laboratory study with thirteen participants; rebuilding prototypes of existing and emerging devices; and by observing seven student teams who built prototypes with d.tools.

The human visual system makes a great deal more of images than the elemental marks on a surface. In the course of viewing, creating, or editing a picture, we actively construct a host of visual structures and relationships as components of sensible interpretations. This paper shows how some of these computational processes can be incorporated into perceptually-supported image editing tools, enabling machines to better engage users at the level of their own percepts. We focus on the domain of freehand sketch editors, such as an electronic whiteboard application for a pen-based computer. By using computer vision techniques to perform covert recognition of visual structure as it emerges during the course of a drawing/editing session, a perceptually supported image editor gives users access to visual objects as they are perceived by the human visual system. We present a flexible image interpretation architecture based on token grouping in a multiscale blackboard data structure. This organization supports multiple perceptual interpretations of line drawing data, domain-specific knowledge bases for interpretable visual structures, and gesture-based selection of visual objects. A system implementing these ideas, called PerSketch, begins to explore a new space of WYPIWYG (What You Perceive Is What You Get) image editing tools.

Involving graphic designers in the large-scale development of user interfaces requires tools that provide more graphical flexibility and support efficient software processes. These requirements were analysed and used in the design of the TkZ-inc graphical library and the IntuiKit interface design environment. More flexibility is obtained through a wider palette of visual techniques and support for iterative construction of images, composition and parametric displays. More efficient processes are obtained with the use of the SVG standard to import graphics, support for linking graphics and behaviour, and a unifying model-driven architecture. We describe the corresponding features of our tools, and show their use in the development of an application for airports. Benefits include a wider access to high quality visual interfaces for specialised applications, and shorter prototyping and development cycles for multidisciplinary teams.

When involved in the visual design of graphical user interfaces, graphic designers can do more than providing static graphics for programmers to incorporate into applications. We describe a technique that allows them to provide examples of graphical objects at various key sizes using their usual drawing tool, then let the system interpolate their resizing behavior. We relate this technique to current practices of graphic designers, provide examples of its use and describe the underlying inference algorithm. We show how the mathematical properties of the algorithm allows the system to be predictable and explain how it can be combined with more traditional layout mechanisms.

The human visual system makes a great deal more of images than the elemental marks on a surface. In the course of viewing, creating, or editing a picture, we actively construct a host of visual structures and relationships as components of sensible interpretations. This paper shows how some of these computational processes can be incorporated into perceptually-supported image editing tools, enabling machines to better engage users at the level of their own percepts. We focus on the domain of freehand sketch editors, such as an electronic whiteboard application for a pen-based computer. By using computer vision techniques to perform covert recognition of visual structure as it emerges during the course of a drawing/editing session, a perceptually supported image editor gives users access to visual objects as they are perceived by the human visual system. We present a flexible image interpretation architecture based on token grouping in a multiscale blackboard data structure. This organization supports multiple perceptual interpretations of line drawing data, domain-specific knowledge bases for interpretable visual structures, and gesture-based selection of visual objects. A system implementing these ideas, called PerSketch, begins to explore a new space of WYPIWYG (What You Perceive Is What You Get) image editing tools.

Rapid, early, but rough system prototypes are becoming a standard and valued part of the user interface design process. Pen, paper, and tools like Flash™ and Director™ are well suited to creating such prototypes. However, in the case of physical forms with embedded technology, there is a lack of tools for developing rapid, early prototypes. Instead, the process tends to be fragmented into prototypes exploring forms that look like the intended product or explorations of functioning interactions that work like the intended product - bringing these aspects together into full design concepts only later in the design process. To help alleviate this problem, we present a simple tool for very rapidly creating functioning, rough physical prototypes early in the design process - supporting what amounts to interactive physical sketching. Our tool allows a designer to combine exploration of form and interactive function, using objects constructed from materials such as thumbtacks, foil, cardboard and masking tape, enhanced with a small electronic sensor board. By means of a simple and fluid tool for delivering events to "screen clippings," these physical sketches can then be easily connected to any existing (or new) program running on a PC to provide real or Wizard of Oz supported functionality.

A central goal of many user interface development tools has been to make the construction of high quality interfaces easy enough that iterative design approaches could be a practical reality. In the last 15 years significant advances in this regard have been achieved. However, the evaluation portion of the iterative design process has received relatively little support from tools. Even though advances have also been made in usability evaluation methods, nearly all evaluation is still done “by hand,” making it more expensive and difficult than it might be. This paper considers a partial implementation of the CRITIQUE usability evaluation tool that is being developed to help remedy this situation by automating a number of evaluation tasks. This paper will consider techniques used by the system to produce predictive models (keystroke level models and simplified GOMS models) from demonstrations of sample tasks in a fraction of the time needed by conventional handcrafting methods. A preliminary comparison of automatically generated models with models created by an expert modeler show them to produce very similar predictions (within 2%). Further, because they are automated, these models promise to be less subject to human error and less affected by the skill of the modeler.

This paper presents a new GUI architecture for creating advanced interfaces. This model is based on a limited set of general principles that improve flexibility and provide capabilities for implementing information visualization techniques such as magic lenses, transparent tools or semantic zooming. This architecture also makes it possible to create multiple views and application-sharing systems (by sharing views on multiple computer screens) in a simple and uniform way and to handle bimanual interaction and multiple pointers. An experimental toolkit called Ubit was implemented to test the feasibility of this approach. It is based on a pseudo-declarative C++ API that tries to simplify GUI programming by providing a higher level of abstraction.

User interface toolkits and higher-level tools built on top of them play an ever increasing part in developing graphical user interfaces. This paper describes the XIT system, a user interface development tool for the X Window System, based on Common Lisp, comprising user interface toolkits as well as high-level interactive tools organized into a layered architecture. We especially focus on the object-oriented design of the lower-level toolkits and show how advanced features for describing automatic screen layout, visual feedback, application links, complex interaction, and dialog control, usually not included in traditional user interface toolkits, are integrated.

In order to create and use rich custom appearances, designers are often forced to introduce an unnatural gap into the design process. For example, a designer creating a skin for a music player must separately specify the appearance of the elements in the music player skin and the mapping between these visual elements and the functionality provided by the music player. This gap between appearance and semantic meaning creates a number of problems. We present a set of techniques that allows designers to use their preferred drawing tool to specify both appearance and semantic meaning. We demonstrate our techniques in an unmodified version of Adobe Photoshop®, but our techniques are general and adaptable to nearly any layered drawing package.