KNOWLEDGE-BASED SUPPORT FOR THE USER INTERFACE DESIGN PROCESS

Uwe Malinowski

Siemens Corporate Research & Development
ZFE ST SN 5
D 81730 M�nchen, Germany
+49 (89) 636-2969
malinow@zfe.siemens.de

Jonas L�wgren
Department of Computer and Information Science
Link�ping University
S-581 83 Link�ping, Sweden
+46 (13) 281482
jlo@ida.liu.se

Kumiyo Nakakoji

Department of Computer Science
University of Colorado
Boulder, CO 80309-430, USA
+1 (303) 492-3912
kumiyo@cs.colorado.edu

Keywords:

user-interface design support, knowledge-based approaches, design environments, combination of support techniques

ISSUES AND GOALS

User interface design is a knowledge-intensive task. Design requirements for the application to be constructed are given as some type of specification. Based on this specification, user interface designers have to take into account several types of design knowledge including: recommendations or quasi-standards of the application domain; corporate-specific user interface guidelines or styleguides of both clients' site and software developers' site; a set of general user interface guidelines; user interface standards if draft versions are already in use. Required knowledge differs from one application domain to another, and the body of knowledge is subject to constant changes.

Proposed ways to deal with the problem of making all this information easily accessible for designers during the design process include "passive" approaches, which allow designers to initiate the search for information in a knowledge- or database. Additionally, "active" approaches are currently developed and tested, e.g. constraints and critics. These mechanisms deliver information (critics) or restrict the design space (constraints) actively, according to the rules and guidelines.

The goal of this workshop is to develop a conceptual map for various supporting techniques for the user interface design process. Rather than applying a single technique, designers can use this map to decide which combination of supporting techniques is appropriate for their current task. During the process of constructing this map, opportunities and limitations of the technical combination of different approaches will be explored. In this workshop, rather than trying to find "the best approach," we use the assumption that combining the approaches increases usefulness as a prerequisite. No discussions about "which technique isare allowed.

The development of the conceptual map and the concept for a technical combination of the different approaches can be guided along the lines of the following questions:

What type of support is useful in different design situations?
What are the strengths and weaknesses of each individual approach?
Are individual approaches better in specific design situations?
How do the approaches deal with problems of
- laying out the interface
- designing the dynamic behavior
- choosing media
- considering cultures (localization & internationalization)
Which types of design knowledge/information is best addressed by which approach?
What combination of approaches can overcome which problems?
What does combination mean?
What parts are application domain specific?
What techniques can be used for knowledge-presentation and interaction of the designer with the supporting component?
Can a combined approach rely on a single knowledge-base? What are the requirements for a knowledge representation?
What does a framework or architecture look like?