Coordinating User Interfaces for Consistency
Use this guide to understand the practices that guarantee regularity in user interfaces.
TABLE OF CONTENTS Coordinating User Interfaces for Consistency
Tools for the application expert and programmer
This section describes the tools that ITS provides for each application development role. An example graphical browser for a hierarchical employee data base is used throughout to demonstrate the use of the tools. Since application content is separate from interface style, the discussion of application tools will be valid for both the graphical view used as an example in this paper, and for any alternative views of hierarchies that style experts and programmers might implement.
In designing the employee browser, the application expert must consider three of the system components shown in Figure 1: (1) what types of data will the browser need to handle, (2) what actions on that data should be provided, and (3) what actions should be permitted at each point in time, i.e. what is the flow of control through the browser. The application expert has tools for each of these three design problems.
Data types
The basic, or primitive, types in ITS include the conventional integer, float, character, and string types found in languages such as C. In addition, ITS allows the application expert to define new types composed from previously defined or primitive types. The basic type used in the employee browser collects information about each individual, including a name, address, serial number, title, salary, and manager's name. In ITS this type would be defined as shown in Figure 2. SERIAL is a primitive Integer type, while NAME is an instance of the FULLNAME user-defined type. MANAGER...
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