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
Design issues in the ITS architecture
We introduced the discussion of ITS tools by describing four roles that are important in system design and implementation. Each of the application expert and programmer, and style expert and programmer have backgrounds and experience which must be accomodated by the tools we provide for them. Some important ways in which the characteristics of these target users have shaped the design of the ITS tools are discussed in this section.
The application expert
The two most important goals for this role are (1) the application expert should be actively involved in producing executable dialogs, and therefore (2) the dialog language should be highly usable by non-programmers. These two goals suggested that the dialog language not be one of the conventional, procedural, programming languages. While the application expert is responsible for designing the flow of control among dialog panels we have factored this task into two subtasks: performing the detailed computations often needed to determine the state of an application, and deciding what to do when an application is in a particular state. How to compute that the application is in a particular state is the domain of the application programmer. What to do in a particular state is the domain of the application expert.
This factoring allows us to trade the generality, power, and complexity of control statements in conventional languages for a smaller set of statements specifically suited to the application expert's task. In a language such as C or PASCAL control is...
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