Larger issues in user interface management

Abstract

Management Systems built and a number of paper s published about them [13] . Most of such papers hav e primarily focused on the issues of dialogue management an d models for describing human-computer dialogues . Suc h research has been somewhat narrow in its focus and has no t addressed a number of larger issues that surround th e development of user interfaces to applications programs . This paper presents a number of these larger issues an d outlines some of the areas that the author believes nee d attention . In an earlier paper [9] examples were given of thre e levels at which user interface issues can be discussed . Th e first is the transaction level . This is where individua l primitive tasks are studied so as to understand whic h interactive devices and interactive techniques are best suite d to accomplish the task . Tasks of this size, menu handling i n particular, have been studied extensively by human factor s experts . The syntactic issues and examples presented i n many UIMS papers are at this level . The reason this level ha s received so much attention is that it can be isolated an d studied in detail . This view has also grown from the idea tha t interactive dialogues can be built by combining simpl e devices to form complex virtual devices and so on in a growing hierarchy until the entire dialogue can be viewed a s a huge virtual device .