User interface tools

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 were built using some form of user interface tool. In this paper, 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...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1994
• Where: CHI
• Authors: Brad A. Myers, Dan R. Olsen
• Keywords: CHI 1994, Human Computer Interaction, User Interface, User Interface Software, User Interface Tools