Computer-Aided Design of User Interfaces

Angel Puerta
RedWhale Software
puerta@redwhale.com

Seminar on People, Computers, and Design
Stanford University October 15, 1999

Tool support for user interface design is in its infancy. A good reason for that is our still primitive knowledge about the cycle of user interface design and development. Consequently, current user-interface tools offer fragmented, localized, sometimes very good, sometimes marginal support. If, however, we were able to define comprehensive methodologies that are not only useful at design time, but that carry through to the runtime of a user interface, I believe we would quickly see a quantum leap in the functionality, flexibility, and affordability of user interfaces, and of the components of such interfaces. These goals are in general the goals of an emerging field called Computer-Aided Design of User Interfaces (CADUI). In this talk, we will examine the key CADUI concepts and fundamentals. We will explain the significant improvements that CADUI systems bring over commercially-available interface builders and toolkits and present some of the most successful applications of this technology.

Angel Puerta received a PhD in Computer from the University of South Carolina in 1991. He then joined Stanford as a research scientist and has worked for a number of years in the area of computer-aided design of user interfaces, more specifically in model-based interface development. While at Stanford, he led successful research teams to build Mecano, an automated user interface generator, and MOBI-D , a model-based interface development environment that is widely recognized as one of the most successful applications of model-based technologies so far.

Early in 1999, Dr. Puerta became founder and CEO of RedWhale Software, a startup firm that will attempt to commercialize CADUI tools and products in addition to conducting research primarily in the field of intelligent user interfaces. Dr. Puerta was a co-founder of the ACM conference series on intelligent user interfaces (IUI) and is the current chair of the steering committee for that series. He is also an elected member to the executive committee of the ACM Special Interest Group on HCI (SIGCHI).

 

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