Knowledge-based design support and discourse management in user interface management systems

Abstract: "This dissertation is about User Interface Management Systems (UIMSs), and more specifically about new ways to extend the scope and the functionality of these systems. I define a UIMS as an interactive tool or set of tools intended to facilitate the design, development and delivery of user interfaces. The assumption underlying the application of UIMS techniques to software development is that the user interface can to some extent be separated from the underlying functionality of the application. Current UIMS technology is, however, not capable of coping with this separation in the case of conversational expert systems.

In the first part of the dissertation, I present a new UIMS architecture, based on planning techniques and a representation of the beliefs of the user and the system, and show by means of an example that dialogue independence can be achieved for a task-oriented expert system by using this new architecture. The second part is concerned with support for the user of the UIMS the user interface designer. The approach I advocate is to enhance the design and development environment with knowledge of user interface design, knowledge which is used to generate comments on the user interface designer's work. A prototype expert critiquing system was built to test the feasibility of knowledge-based evaluation of user interface designs.

The results were encouraging and also demonstrated that the level of user interface representation is crucial for the quality of the evaluation. I propose an architecture where this kind of knowledge-based support is integrated with a UIMS and argue that the requirements on a high-level user interface representation can be relaxed if the system also analyses data from empirical tests of the user interface prototype."