ADDI: a tool for automating the design of visual interfaces

Abstract Visual interfaces are often poorly designed because the application developers lack graphics design knowledge. Designing effective interfaces requires great effort, especially when many types of graphical objects and relations are involved. In addition, many domain applications require interactive and dynamic graphical interfaces. Existing automatic graphical presentation systems focus on interfaces that convey only static information. Current user interface management systems that facilitate the process of creating interfaces for applications provide no assistance to help developers design the visualization features of interfaces. The aim of this research is to contribute to the design process of interfaces in general and dynamic ones in particular. A model-based framework and prototype tool called ADDI (Automatic Design of Dynamic Interfaces) has been created to help developers design domain-specific visual interfaces. ADDI combines a specification application with various visualization knowledge-base components to automatically generate a visual interface. Therefore, graphical user interface designers, by using ADDI, can select visual properties and hence be able to rapidly and correctly convey information visually according to the task specification in a domain application. Accordingly, high quality and consistent interfaces are generated even when the application developers lack the necessary graphics expertise. ADDI supports visual interface designers in four ways. The first is automatically determining the visual appearance of the interface objects from the Application Model specification. The second is computing the sizes and positions of the visual objects. The third is allowing developers to specify their preferences of designing visual objects. The fourth is aiding them in creating specific interactive presentation functions for end-users to interact with the interface.