Automating the lexical and syntactic design of graphical user interfaces

Abstract

The primary goal of this thesis is to address a key problem with UIMSs: their inability to help in the initial design of user interfaces. Because of this inability, existing UIMSs require the interface designer to work at very low levels of syntactic and lexical details, which can be very time-consuming and expensive in terms of effort required. Also, the detailed design produced by the designer must be provided to the UIMS in a notation that it can process, which makes the UIMS difficult to use and increases the chance of error as the interface descriptions tend to be quite large. The approach followed in this thesis to tackle this problem is to automatically produce the initial design of the user interface and implement it, and then enable the interface designer to improve its appearance and effectiveness by refining it. The interface designer, in this approach, works at the conceptual level of the user interface and produces a high level description of the commands the interface is to support. Based on this description the syntactic and lexical levels of the interface are automatically designed and implemented. This interface can be refined by the designer to improve the resulting interaction with the user. A UIMS based on this approach has been developed, and the research leading to its design and implementation is described in this thesis. (Abstract shortened with permission of author.)