Developing a prototype interface for the computer system

[Name of the Institute]

Developing a prototype interface for the computer system

Introduction

Requirements need to be validated at an early stage of analysis to address inconsistency and incompleteness issues. Capturing requirements usually involves natural language analysis, which is often imprecise, and error prone, or translation into formal models, which are difficult for nontechnical stakeholders to understand and use. Users often best understand proposed software systems from the likely user interface they will present. To this end we describe novel automated tool support for capturing requirements as Essential Use Cases and translating these into “Essential User Interface” low-fidelity rapid prototypes. We describe our automated tool supporting requirements capture, lo-fi user interface prototype generation and consistency management.

Different manufactures have various user interfaces (UIs) for the corresponding devices, which bring immense inconvenience to the user. A method got presented in this paper to make interfaces that can be customized by users. It employs the approach of separating widgets of UIs from functions and binding functions to device drivers dynamically. The customized interfaces can be applied to all similar devices from various manufactures. A generic user interface customization model and an implementation scheme proposed based on the method above, as well as a prototype system in the printer field.

Discussion

User interface (UI) also called human-computer interface (HCI), which is the media and dialogic interface of information transmission and exchange between human and computer. In a sense speaking, the interface is the entire software system to the user. So the quality of the UI can greatly affect the user's accuracy, efficiency and mood. UI occupies very important position in the software system, but the most volatile in the system. Currently, various manufactures have different user interfaces for some of the devices of the same type (such like air conditioner interfaces and printer interfaces in different manufactures are always different), but the functions they achieved are almost same. Users have to adapt more and more new interfaces when they are using these devices. It brings immense inconvenience to the user. Therefore, a customized interface in a field gets urgently needed for the user. Aiming at making the user interface customization in a field come to the realization, a method of design of general user interface of the same type of devices in a specific field presented in this paper from the viewpoint of users. The goal is to realize the generality and customization of interfaces based on the unified, functional concepts and mapping mechanism between the interface and device drivers of different manufactures.

System Design

Interface Analysis

For the same devices, various manufactures have their own UIs which are always different from each other. This phenomenon makes users have to adapt new UIs when new devices appeared. It is absolutely inconvenient and boring to users especially those with little knowledge or aged. Therefore, interface customization in a field is a very important solution to above-mentioned problem. As shown in Figure 1, vendor UI' means UIs in various manufactures; "MyUI" means interfaces customized by users; “Device” means ...