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This article presents the authors' research for developing the graphical user interface of a tutorial system for training of specialized personnel in Small and Middle Enterprises (SMEs), in order to eliminate or reduce the risks of these enterprises to an acceptable level, according to the European Union directives. The realization of the graphical interface must take into account the characteristics of the end users, who are possibly not advanced in the use of computers and software.

We present Mavigator, a prototype of a graphical user interface to databases. The system is dedicated to naive users (computer non-professionals) and allows them to retrieve information from any data source, including object-oriented and XML-oriented databases. The system extends its core functionalities by the Active Extensions (AE) module, which assumes a trade-off between simplicity of user retrieval interfaces and complexity of output formatting functions. In AE the latter are to be done by a programmer using a fully-fledged programming language (currently C#). Thus the retrieved data can be post-processed or presented in any conceivable visual form. Another novel feature of the Mavigator is the Virtual Schemas module, which allows customization of a database schema, in particular, changing some names, adding new associations or hiding some classes.

The special session will discuss challenges, real-world examples and future directions in the collaborative design of the user interfaces of mobile services, devices and application in and between Asia and the West.

Eye-control as an interaction mechanism for desktop computers was proposed already long time ago (e.g.; [Bolt 1982]). However, few systematic approaches to universal design guidelines and interaction elements for gaze-controlled user interfaces have been made. Graphical user interfaces comprise of two components: first, a pointing device, and secondly, the graphical interface itself, where the pointing device is sliding on and triggers actions. Whereas a lot of research work has focused on the pointing device, such as eye tracking hardware, improvements of the calibration process and measuring accuracy, the design of an appropriate user interface optimized for gaze control has not been covered extensively so far.

In this paper we describe how content can be created in a way that ensures its integrity at all times, and how the user interface for such a content editing program can be modeled using the methodology of form-oriented analysis. The paper discusses aspects concerning the data that is being created, as well as aspects of the content editor itself. We show that technological features like typing, opaque identities and user transactions can facilitate the process of content creation as experienced by the user significantly, and that these features can be effectively incorporated when using the form-oriented analysis model.

So far the field of model based user interface development has focused mostly on the usage of one device, such as a Personal Computer, by one person. New interaction techniques emerge in which the user interacts with the surrounding world while using the mobile phone as a mediator for physical interactions and as communication tool to interact with services and other users. Here several devices or physical elements are used for input and output, and more than one user might be involved. These new settings require description models to support the analysis, design and implementation of systems that take such interaction techniques into account. We present the new UML 2.0 Physical User Interface Profile (PUIP) that is based on the UML 2.0 Profile for Context-Sensitive User Interface (CUP, [24]) to support the modelling of this kind of interactions. We show the feasibility of our approach through the modelling of an existing physical mobile interaction and discuss its suitability.

Creating user interfaces in a common task in application development. It can become time and money consuming if the same application is to be run on more platforms with different restrictions and requirements. To reduce the development cost and time the user interface can be defined on an abstract level in the form of a task model. Explicit defining and maintaining the task model can complicate the development especially in its early stages when application prototype are built. We present a way to define a user interface on an abstract level without explicit definition of the user interface module while keeping it transparent, thus reducing the work required to make functional application prototypes. Our approach is based on derivation of a user interface module directly from an application source code enriched by abstract commands of user interaction to control the generation of the user interface.

We present in this poster our work on a User Interface Markup Language (UIML) vocabulary for the specification of device- and modality independent user interfaces. The work presented here is part of an application-oriented project. One of the results of the project is a prototype implementation of a generic platform for device independent multimodal mobile applications. The poster presents the requirements for a generic user interface description format and explains our approach on an integrated description of user interfaces for both graphical and voice modality. A basic overview of the vocabulary structure, its language elements and main features is presented.

The problem of developing several user interface modules for an application is overviewed. The main problems and advantages of using the different technologies in this aspect are discussed. The paper describes an implementation of an extended user interface, based on scripts, its internal structure and organisation. The goals and the approach are discussed. An approach for intelligent, CLIPS-based control of the user interactions is suggested. An implementation of such a software system is presented.

We present in this paper a new computer-aided design for user interfaces tool that leans on several well-defined formalisms. This development tool for end-users is called SUIDT (Safe User Interface Design Tool). It uses visual programming techniques to build every application model and allows building the final application with respect to all models.

Many applications now require access from diverse human-computer interaction devices, such as desktop computers, web browsers, PDAs, mobile phones, pagers and so on. We describe our experiences developing a multi-device travel planning application built from reusable components, many of these developed from several different previous projects. We focus on key user interface design and component adaptation and integration issues as encountered in this problem domain. We report on the results of a useability evaluation of our prototype and our current research directions addressing HCI and interface development problems we encountered.

This half-day tutorial provides participants with an understanding of the fundamental concepts in speech recognition and how best to use this technology in the design of user interfaces for personal and mobile devices. A number of guidelines and case studies are presented and discussed. The tutorial finishes with a group exercise that allows participants to apply the design guidelines to an actual device.

Interfhce builders are popular tools for designing and developing graphical user interfaces. These tools, however, are engineering-centered; they operate mainly on windows and widgets. A typical interface builder does not offer any specific support for user-centered interface design, a methodology recognized as critical for effective user interface design. We present MOBILE (Model-Based Inter&xx Layout Editor) an interface building tool that iidly supports user-centered design and that guides the htafhce building process by using user-task models and a knowledge base of interface design guidelines. The approach in MOBILE has the important added benefit of being useful in both top-down and bottom-up interface design strategies.

A challenge for human-computer interaction researchers and user interface designers is to construct information technologies that support creativity. This ambitious goal can be attained by building on an adequate understanding of creative processes. This paper expands on the four-phase genex framework for generating excellence [l]. Within this integrated Mework, this paper proposes eight activities that require human-computer interaction research and advanced user interface design.

This workshop will bring together a small group of researchers and practitioners to discuss how to design applications with both a verbal user interface (the user hears and speaks to the application) and a visual user interface (the user draws/writes and sees the application). Our goal is to better understand the issues that face designers of applications with multimedia interfaces integrating both visual and verbal interaction styles, exchange ideas and information, and increase communication among the diverse groups involved in multimedia interfaces.

This paper describes preliminary usability testing for a graphical interface designed to facilitate rapid browsing of speech records. Expert interviews and focus group discussions were used to assess the alignment between browsing behaviors employed by members of the intended user population and an early mockup of the interface. The results provide guidelines for the next iteration of prototype development and suggest that graphical representations offer a viable method for browsing audio and multimedia recordings.

In this paper, we describe the &velopment of a new, nonhsptic user interface for IBM-compatible PCs. The results of &velopment itself have been demonstrated at a computer graphics conference [3]. ‘l%e advanced user interface consistsof a combination of spoken commands and head movements. It translates spatial and symbolic input into the traditional mouse, keyboard, and system events.

The Amulet research project is developing a new user interface development environment [2] which incorporates a number of design and implementation innovations including new models for objects, constraints, animation, output, input, commands, and undo. Amulet has an open architecture, so that user interface researchers can replace and extend components. Amulet, which stands for Automatic Manufacture of Usable and Learnable Editors and Toolkits, is implemented in C++, and runs on X/11, Windows NT, Windows 95, and the Macintosh.

This paper proposes a new field of user interfaces called multi-computer direct manipulation and presents a penbased direct manipulation technique that can be used for data transfer between different computers as well as within the same computer. The proposed Pick-andDrop allows a user to pick up an object on a display and drop it on another display as if he/she were manipulating a physical object. Even though the pen itself does not have storage capabilities, a combination of Pen-ID and the pen manager on the network provides the illusion that the pen can physically pick up and move a computer object. Based on this concept, we have built several experimental applications using palm-sized, desk-top, and wall-sized pen computers. We also considered the importance of physical artifacts in designing user interfaces in a future computing environment.

This paper presents an intelligent adaptive systcm for the integration of haptic output in graphical user interfaces. The system observes the user’s actions, extracts meaningful features, and generates a user and application specific model. When the model is sufficiently delailled, it is used to predict the widget which is most likely 10 be used next by the user. Upon entering this widget, two magnets in a specialized mouse are activated to stop the movement, so target acquisition becomes easier and more comfortable. Besides the intelligent control system, we will present several methods to generate haptic cues which might be integrated in mttltimodal user interfaces in the future.

The metaDESK is a user interface platform demonstrating new interaction techniques we call "tangible user inter- faces." We explore the physical instantiation of interface elements from the graphical user interface paradigm, giving physical form to windows, icons, handles, menus, and controls. The design and implementation of the metaDESK display, sensor, and software architectures is discussed. A prototype application driving an interaction with geographi- cal space, Tangible Geospace, is presented to demonstrate these concepts.

The Digital Library Integrated Task Environment (DLITE) is a novel user interface concept for distributed document collections and services. It is an interaction prototype, not a polished graphical user interface, and is a front end to an evolving variety of distributed document services. DLITE is part of the Stanford University Digital Libraries research project. This videotape explains the principles of the DLITE design and shows the current implementation in action.

The visual and event driven nature of modem user interfaces, while a boon to users, can also make them more difficult to debug than conventional programs. This is because only the very surface representation of interactive objects their final visual appearance is visible to the programmer on the screen. The remaining “programming details” of the object remain hidden. If the appearance or behavior of an object is incorrect, often few clues are visible to indicate the cause. One must usually turn to text oriented debugging techniques (debuggers or simply print statements) which are separate from the interface, and often cumbersome to use with event-driven control flow. This paper describes a new class of techniques designed to aid in the debugging of user interfaces by making more of the invisible, visible. This class of techniques: debugging lenses, makes use of transparent lens interaction techniques to show debugging information. It is designed to work in situ in the context of a running interface, without stopping or interfering with that interface.This paper describes and motivates the class of techniques, gives a number of specific examples of debugging lenses, and ,describes their implementation in’ the subArctic user interface toolkit. ”

Usability tests comparing three different virtual environment (VE) interface designs indicate that an immersive VE is more usable than two non-immersive VEs for a task with search and navigation components. Three interface designs were tried in a counterbalanced within-subjects procedure with ten randomly-ordered trials for each interface design. One of the interface designs used a head-tracked, stereoscopic head-mounted display. The other two interface designs used hand-tracking and were non-immersive---the visual display appeared on a desktop monitor. Results for sixty participants doing the same task with each interface design show faster task completion times with the immersive design.

The User Interface Software Group at CMU is investigating ways to make the design, prototyping, and implementation of user interfaces substantially easier. Unlike other user interface development environments that deal only with widgets like menus, scroll bars and buttons, we concentrate on the insides of application windows, which is the part that takes most of the programmer's time to design and implement. Typical applications of the technology include visualizations and visual programming environments, drawing programs, user interfaces for expert systems, graph editors, graphical programming languages, game user interfaces, simulation and process monitoring programs, user interface construction tools, CAD/CAM programs, etc.

Incorporating flexibility to select desirable modality into user interface systems is needed for people with disabilities, since most modern applications use graphical user interfaces forcing fixed modality which is useful only to sighted users.However, the requirement of user interfaces with flexible and selectable modality is not a specific problem of disabled persons but a general problem of interfaces in the next generation, considering that environments, in which computers are used, are widening rapidly.This paper discusses about an architecture of user interface toolkit to support flexibility required by both users with disability and users in special environment, and proposes a model of semantic abstraction of user interaction, named abstract widgets. The experimental implementation of such toolkit, named Fruit system, is also described.

The Visage prototype responds to data-intensive work environments where users, exploring and analyzing data, struggle to make useful multiple applications with disparate visualizations of potentially related information. Visage seeks to coordinate the exploration, analyses, and visualizations of information regardless of their source or type. This coordination is accomplished by using an information-centric approach to user interface design to eliminate impediments to direct user access to information objects across applications and visualizations. Visage consists of a set of data manipulation operations, an intelligent system for generating data visualizations and a briefing tool that supports the conversion of visual displays used into interactive presentation slides.