USER INTERFACE DESIGN

User Interface Design

Chapter 1 Problem Definition

The user interface (UI) design has beenexplored in the communities of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Software Engineering (SE): the software should carry out those tasks for which it is conceived and the UI should be friendly and usable

Enough for users . UI design is a software development task which has been deeply studied from the early years of computer software development . Due to the increasingly complexity applications, the UI design has become amore difficult task in which many artifacts and software components are required. Manyproposalsof software architectures (for instance, HCI mmodel , MVC , PAC , ARCH and PAC Amodeus among others)propose guidelines about how the UI design and the implementation should be carried out. UI design aspects focus not only of the behavioral parts of the UI butal soon the layout part . In addition, UI design methods involve user participation during the information gathering phases, UI design and UI evaluation. All these aspects are called user centered design methods . (Johnson, 1997)

The handling of more complex applications has lead to the development of tools for UI design , in which the system designer works with high-level and abstract models, in particular visual modeling of UIs. The level of abstraction on UI design allows the UIs to be adapted and generated for several platforms. The design of UIs is now a development process in which a high-level specification and modeling of the UI play a crucial role. (Liu,1997)

The model-driven development (MDD)o fUIs consists of the specification of the UIs through declarative and visual models that describe multiple perspectives and artifacts involved in the development of the UI. The MDD is based on visual tools in which the system designer uses a graphical notation to depict multiple models from different perspectives. Code generators of such tools generate a code according to the specified model which allows the changes in the specification to be easily mapped in to the code. (Johnson, 1997)

A user interface (UI) for a geographic information system provides means for users to (a) input data to and (b) retrieve data from a specific system. All the means that contribute and facilitate these actions are considered to be part of the UI. For example, a map application that is accessible through the World Wide Web might allow users to specify addresses by typing text, pressing buttons to initiate an operation, or moving sliders to select an appropriate map scale. The application will answer these requests with graphical maps or textual descriptions of routes. Both the input and the output part of the software together with the dedicated hardware (such as a mouse or a keyboard) are part of the UI to that mapping application. Other software parts of the system are referred to as program logic (e.g., the calculation of a shortest path) or databases (e.g., containing the street network) and are usually not part of the UI. (Hix, 1993)

Software engineering is the application of a systematic, disciplined, quantifiable approach to the ...