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Helping programmers help users

Published:22 October 2011Publication History
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Abstract

User interfaces exhibit a wide range of features that are designed to assist users. Interaction with one widget may trigger value changes, disabling, or other behaviors in other widgets. Such automatic behavior may be confusing or disruptive to users. Research literature on user interfaces offers a number of solutions, including interface features for explaining or controlling these behaviors. To help programmers help users, the implementation costs of these features need to be much lower. Ideally, they could be generated for free. This paper shows how several help and control mechanisms can be implemented as algorithms and reused across interfaces, making the cost of their adoption negligible. Specifically, we describe generic help mechanisms for visualizing data flow and explaining command deactivation, and a mechanism for controlling the flow of data. A reusable implementation of these features is enabled by our property model framework, where the data manipulated through a user interface is modeled as a constraint system.

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    • Published in

      cover image ACM SIGPLAN Notices
      ACM SIGPLAN Notices  Volume 47, Issue 3
      GCPE '11
      March 2012
      179 pages
      ISSN:0362-1340
      EISSN:1558-1160
      DOI:10.1145/2189751
      Issue’s Table of Contents
      • cover image ACM Conferences
        GPCE '11: Proceedings of the 10th ACM international conference on Generative programming and component engineering
        October 2011
        194 pages
        ISBN:9781450306898
        DOI:10.1145/2047862

      Copyright © 2011 ACM

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      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      • Published: 22 October 2011

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