Design Principles For Interactive Software

Design Principles for Interactive Software

IFIP's Working Group 2.7(13.4)* has, since its establishment in 1974, con centrated on the software problems of user interfaces. From its original interest in operating systems interfaces the group has gradually shifted em phasis towards the development of interactive systems. The group has orga nized a number of international working conferences on interactive software technology, the proceedings of which have contributed to the accumulated knowledge in the field. The current title of the Working Group is 'User Interface Engineering', with the aim of investigating the nature, concepts, and construction of user interfaces for software systems. The scope of work involved is: - to increase understanding of the development of interactive systems; - to provide a framework for reasoning about interactive systems; - to provide engineering models for their development. This report addresses all three aspects of the scope, as further described below. In 1986 the working group published a report (Beech, 1986) with an object-oriented reference model for describing the components of operating systems interfaces. The modelwas implementation oriented and built on an object concept and the notion of interaction as consisting of commands and responses. Through working with that model the group addressed a number of issues, such as multi-media and multi-modal interfaces, customizable in terfaces, and history logging. However, a conclusion was reached that many software design considerations and principles are independent of implemen tation models, but do depend on the nature of the interaction process.

Design Principles for Interactive Software

Engineering Human Computer Interaction and Interactive Systems

As its name suggests, the EHCI-DSVIS conference has been a special event, merging two different, although overlapping, research communities: EHCI (Engineering for Human-Computer Interaction) is a conference organized by the IFIP 2.7/13.4 working group, started in 1974 and held every three years since 1989. The group’s activity is the scientific investigation of the relationships among the human factors in computing and software engineering. DSVIS (Design, Specification and Verification of Interactive Systems) is an annual conference started in 1994, and dedicated to the use of formal methods for the design of interactive systems. Of course these two research domains have a lot in common, and are informed by each other’s results. The year 2004 was a good opportunity to bring closer these two research communities for an event, the 11th edition of DSVIS and the 9th edition of EHCI. EHCI-DSVIS was set up as a working conference bringing together researchers and practitioners interested in strengthening the scientific foundations of user interface design, specification and verification, and in examining the relationships between software engineering and human-computer interaction. The call for papers attracted a lot of attention, and we received a record number of submissions: out of the 65 submissions, 23 full papers were accepted, which gives an acceptance rate of approximately 34%. Three short papers were also included. The contributions were categorized in 8 chapters: Chapter 1 (Usability and Software Architecture) contains three contributions which advance the state of the art in usability approaches for modern software engineering.