Informal user interfaces

Comments on Interactive Sketching for the Early Stages of User Interface Design, by James A. Landay and Brad A. Myers, In Proceedings of CHI '95: Human Factors in Computing Systems, Denver, CO, May 1995, pp. 43-50

and

Sketching Storyboards to Illustrate Interface Behaviors, by James A. Landay And Brad A. Myers, In CHI '96 Conference Companion: Human Factors in Computing Systems, Vancouver, Canada, April 1996. [PostScript, PDF]

  1. Surveying real UI designers before designing SILK is great. The paper didn't really follow-up, though, even with the author's opinions -- is using SILK at all like the "pencil and paper interface"?
  2. I wondered why, twice, the authors stated that the intended users of SILK are graphic designers, but never said why. There is an implicit assumption through the paper that UIs should be designed by professional designers (i.e. not programmers) but I think it should have been stated explicitly.
  3. The fact that designers wanted to design controls with custom looks surprised me a little. In Web page design, there seems to be a usability camp (eg Jakob Neilson) and a graphic design camp (David Seigel) -- is there a similar tension in UI design? If a tool gave a designer arbitrary control over look-and-feel, presumably consistency in the UI goes out the window.
  4. The need to use a visual language or scripting to specify behaviours seems to be a weakness in the approach, as it makes the "paper and paper interface" seems rather a long way away again.

Comments on Ambiguous Intentions - a Paper-like Interface for Creative Design, by Gross, M. D. and E. Do, in Proceedings of the Ninth Annual Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, (UIST '96), pp. 183-192.

  1. I would love to have a tool like this for software design.
  2. The authors state that "previously compiled parsing rules" as a drawback of SILK, yet aren't their own patterns and rewrite rules the same thing?
  3. Showing LISP code in the user interface is a bad idea, I think... They did realize that the recognition feedback was distracting and annoying, at least. (The recognition feedback seems to me to be an instance of Cooper's "technology paradigm" interface.)
  4. The advantages of a rewrite rule, such as converting five boxes into a dining table symbol, seems somewhat dubious to me. Why wouldn't I just draw the dining table symbol in the first place?

Comments on "Translucent Patches - Dissolving Windows," by Axel Kramer, in Proceedings of Seventh Annual Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, (UIST '94), pp. 121-130.

  1. The designer is a "she" and the client is a "he"? I think pluralizing personal pronouns to avoid sexism is much better than allowing these kinds of slips...
  2. I didn't really understand this paper too well.

John Reekie, March 13th, 1998.