Marquise: creating complete user interfaces by demonstration

Marquise is a new interactive tool that allows virtually all of the user interfaces of graphical editors to be created by demonstration without programming. A “graphical editor” allows the user to create and manipulate graphical objects with a mouse. This is a very large class of programs and includes drawing programs like MacDraw, graph layout editors like MacProject, visual language editors, and many CAD/CAM programs. The primary innovation in Marquise is to allow the designer to demonstrate the overall behavior of the interface. To implement this, the Marquise framework contains knowledge about palettes for creating and specifying properties of objects, and about operations such as selecting, moving, and deleting objects. The interactive tool uses the framework to allow the designer to demonstrate most of the end user's actions without programming, which means that Marquise can be used by non-programmers.