Design Notations and User Interface Management Systems

The topic of this paper is the design notations required to support User Interface Management Systems (UIMS). For the purposes of this paper a user interface is the software module that stands between the user and the rest of the program. The user interface is the only part of the program that directly deals with the user, all the other modules obtain user input from the user interface and rely on the user interface to present output to the user. Traditionally the user interface has been programmed by hand. The hand construction of the user interface for each new application is costly and has a negative effect on user interface quality. This need not be the case since the same basic user interface structure can be used in a wide range of applications. This leads to the notion of a UIMS, a program that automatically constructs a user interface given a description of it.