Designing BiblioText: An Experiment in User Interface Design

Abstract

Principled approaches to the design of user interfaces are typically unsubstantiated by practical experience, or are validated only through laboratory experiments with toy programs. This experiment applies several theoretically motivated approaches to the user interface of an existing, practical program of moderate complexity; these approaches include conceptual models, task based design, the use of metaphor, direct manipulation, and empirical evaluation. Although necessarily informal, the experiment yields insight into the utility of these approaches, as well as observations on more general themes such as specialization versus generality, multiple models and their limits, the problem of context, and the elusiveness of consistency as a design goal.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Oct 24, 1988
Accession Number
ADA619797

Entities

People

  • Michael L. Van De Vanter

Organizations

  • University of California, Berkeley

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Cyber
  • Human Systems

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Abstracts
  • Acquisition
  • Application Software
  • California
  • Cognitive Systems Engineering
  • Computer Programming
  • Computer Programs
  • Computer Science
  • Computers
  • Databases
  • Human-Computer Interaction
  • Information Science
  • Observation
  • Operating Systems
  • Psychology
  • User Interface
  • User Interface Engineering

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Computational Modeling and Simulation
  • Database Systems and Applications
  • Systems Analysis and Design