Brad Myers
Scott E. Hudson
Randy Pausch
Abstract
A user interface software tool helps developers design and implement the user interface. Research on past tools has had enormous impact on today's developers—virtually all applications today are built using some form of user interface tool. In this article, we consider cases of both success and failure in past user interface tools. From these cases we extract a set of themes which can serve as lessons for future work. Using these themes, past tools can be characterized by what aspects of the user interface they addressed, their threshold and ceiling, what path of least resistance they offer, how predictable they are to use, and whether they addressed a target that became irrelevant. We believe the lessons of these past themes are particularly important now, because increasingly rapid technological changes are likely to significantly change user interfaces. We are at the dawn of an era where user interfaces are about to break out of the “desktop” box where they have been stuck for the past 15 years. The next millenium will open with an increasing diversity of user interface on an increasing diversity of computerized devices. These devices include hand-held personal digital assistants (PDAs), cell phones, pages, computerized pens, computerized notepads, and various kinds of desk and wall size-computers, as well as devices in everyday objects (such as mounted on refridgerators, or even embedded in truck tires). The increased connectivity of computers, initially evidenced by the World Wide Web, but spreading also with technologies such as personal-area networks, will also have a profound effect on the user interface to computers. Another important force will be recognition-based user interfaces, especially speech, and camera-based vision systems. Other changes we see are an increasing need for 3D and end-user customization, programming, and scripting. All of these changes will require significant support from the underlying user interface sofware tools.
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Index Terms
- Past, present, and future of user interface software tools
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Reviews
Ben Shneiderman
These three authors were key participants in the remarkable success story of user interface software tools. While some branches of software engineering were struggling to get 10 percent increases in programmer productivity, user interface tools often produced 1000 percent speedups. The magic was to standardize on the right set of window strategies, supported by toolkits that contained a library of appropriate widgets. Other success stories were event and scripting languages, interactive graphic editing tools, and object-oriented programming. The final piece of magic was hypertext systems with authoring tools that enabled large numbers of users to create high-production-value content. The cleverest part of the paper is the list of themes for evaluating these successful tools and explaining why others failed. The authors even go so far as to honestly criticize their own early work. I particularly liked the analysis of problems with systems that had a low threshold of entry (easy to learn), but too low a ceiling of capability, as well as those where the threshold of entry was too high. Another favorite point is the emphasis on predictable systems that programmers could understand. The list of themes serves well in analyzing scenarios for the future: computers as commodity, ubiquitous, 3-D, and customizable. I am surprised by the authors' optimism about recognition-based interfaces, considering their appropriate concern about predictability. I caught only one important slip: the Xerox STAR is listed with the Macintosh OS and Windows as having overlapping windows.
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