David Carr, Institutionen för systemteknik, Tekniska högskolan i Luleå: Specification of User-Interface Interaction Objects

Seminarium i datavetenskap och informatik

User Interface Management Systems (UIMS) have significantly reduced the effort required to build a user interface. However, current systems assume a set of standard "widgets" and make no provisions for defining new ones. This forces user interface designers to either do without or laboriously build new widgets with code. Often it is impossible to add these new widgets into the UIMS. The Interaction Object Graph (IOG) is presented as a method for specifying and communicating the design of widgets.

IOGs build upon earlier user interface dialog specification methods: User Action Notation, state machines, statecharts, and Interface Representation Graphs (IRG). They are intended as an extension to IRGs providing a way to build new widgets in a IRG based UIMS. IOGs can also be used to communicate designs between widget designers and widget developers.

In this talk, Interaction Object Graphs will be explained and compared with earlier specification methods, example specifications will be presented, and experiences with using IOGs when building the University of Maryland Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory widget library will be discussed.

A short biography of David Carr based on his World Wide Web homepage given on the next page.

Välkommna!
Kenneth Nilsson

David Carr works as a universitets lektor (Assistant Professor) at the Division of Computer Science and Engineering. He also works on research with the Centre for Distancespanning Technology. Research Interests User Interface Specification, User Interface Developement Tools, User Interface Design. Current Teaching Human-Computer Interaction Programming Languages (Java section) Object Oriented Programming

Recent Papers by Subject Area:

Widget Specification

Carr, D., "Toward More Understandable User Interface Specifications", Design, Specification, and Verification of Interactive Systems '96, F. Bodart & J. Vanderdonckt eds., Springer-Verlag, Vienna, 1996, pp. 141-161.

[ A4 postscript version]

Carr, D., A Compact Graphical Representation of User Interface Interaction Objects, University of Maryland, Department of Computer Science, Ph.D., 1995. [postscript versions: US Letter 124 pages, A4 117 pages]

Carr, D., "Specification of Interface Interaction Objects", Proceedings of the ACM CHI'94 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 372-378, 1994. [postscript version]

Carr, D., N. Jog, H. P. Kumar, M. Teittinen, and C. Ahlberg, Using Interaction Object Graphs to Specify and Develop Graphical Widgets, University of Maryland Department of Computer Science Technical Report (Sept. 1994), [CS-TR-3344, from University of Maryland].

Browsing

Plaisant, C., D. Carr, and B. Shneiderman, "Image Browser Taxonomy and Guidelines for Designers", IEEE Software, Vol. 12, No. 2, March 1995, pp. 21-32

Telepathology

Carr, D., C. Plaisant, and H. Hasegawa, The Design of a Telepathology Workstation: Exploring Remote Images, University of Maryland Dept. of Computer Science Technical Report (May 1994), [CS-TR-3270, from University of

Maryland].

Carr, D., H. Hasegawa, D. Lemmon, and C. Plaisant, "The Effects of Time Delays on a Telepathology User Interface", in The Proceedings of the 16th Annual Symposium on Computer Applications in Medical Care, M.E. Frisse, Editor, (SCAMC, Baltimore, MD, Nov. 7-11, 1992), pp. 256-260. [postscript version]

Plaisant, C., D. Carr, and H. Hasegawa, When an Intermediate View Matters: A 2D Browser Experiment, University of Maryland Department of Computer Science Technical Report, (Oct. 1992), [CS-TR-2980, from University of Maryland].

Most of the above references can be downloaded from http://www.luth.se/info_sv.html