In the near future, many interfaces
will not be designed by coding, nor will they
be designed by mousing on menu items.
Instead, interfaces will be implemented from sketches.
Technologies currently under development
in the Human Interface Laboratory of MCC
enable the generation of dynamic, iconic interfaces
directly from a designer's sketch.
Sketching is the quintessential design activity.
It is involved in a myriad of disciplines,
from circuit design to architecture.
It has been called a skill of the hand that
becomes a tool of the mind.
The process of sketching is a way to see order.
Unfortunately, most technologies introduce
intermediaries between the interface designer
and the artifact being designed.
The designer's sketches have to be refined and then rendered.
Even if the application exists, the drawing
must be converted into coded prototypes,
interrupting the design process.
These delays introduce misinterpretations
and long feedback cycles.
HITS, the Human Interface Toolset,
promises to remove many of these disruptions
and provides a more natural environment for design.
HITS is a unified collection of tools employing
a runtime blackboard architecture
and an underlying knowledge base for the construction
of collaborative multimedia interfaces.
We intend interfaces built with HITS
to assist with complex knowledge-intensive
applications in which sketching, graphics,
natural language, and other modalities are required.
The current context of our work is knowledge-based interfaces.
We are focusing on providing explicit representations
of the knowledge required for interface design.
Such knowledge encompasses a wide range of information,
from abstract conceptualization of communicative acts to that
required for context-sensitive understandings of the intended
meaning of a mouse click.
To illustrate the power of HITS, we
turn to a particular example, the use of HITS
to design a [? copier ?] control panel.
We will show how a design of an interface
proceeds directly through from an initial sketch
to a complete working simulation.
Sketches are done on an experimental interactive work
surface designed in our laboratory.
The interactive work service provides a 17
by 24-inch flat, high-resolution,
touch-sensitive sketching surface.
We believe this more flexible form of interaction,
via what could be termed silicon paper,
will be a major characteristic of future computer systems.
It has the ease of interaction found in paper and whiteboards,
but is augmented by the power of computation.
An entire interface could be sketched without interruption.
But a more interactive mode is available.
As components are sketched, a neural net
trained on copier interface symbols recognizes them.
We begin constructing the copier interface.
A shape is drawn and recognized.
Each recognizable sketch is represented
in the knowledge base.
The HITS icon editor was used to design icons to be associated
with each type of component.
The neural net recognizes the sketch as a button
and uses the knowledge base to instantiate an icon that
replaces the sketch.
As the copier interface develops,
incrementally describing it in the knowledge base
allows analysis, advising, and coaching.
The collaborative paradigm we use here
is that of nonintrusive angels that watch users' actions.
When the system desires to comment on an action,
the angel's icon representation changes from a question mark
to a light bulb.
When the user sketches a second button,
the recognized button may violate various graphic design
principles.
For example, in many effective designs,
similar components are aligned and are of the same size.
Adding the new button activates advisory knowledge sources that
represent graphic principles.
This causes an angel to indicate that a violation has occurred.
At any point, the panel designer can
decide to consult the angel to obtain comments
about the current design.
The first comment indicates that the principle
of significant difference of size has been violated.
The user can ask about techniques
for correcting this problem or might
decide to wait until a latter point in the design process
to deal with the problem.
Here, the user decides to equalize
the size of the buttons based on the smaller button.
Complex artifacts, like copiers, contain
a multitude of components.
A knowledge base that models copiers
will contain many objects created
by different individuals, perhaps working over
a long period of time.
The user of a copier interface design tool
we'll need to refer to parts of this underlying model
without necessarily knowing the names the knowledge base
designers have assigned.
Restricted natural language provides an effective solution
to this problem.
In this demonstration, the designer
can type in a description of the modeled function,
such as the copy starting action, starting the copier,
or the Start function.
[? Lucy, ?] our natural language system,
then maps this to the appropriate concept
in the knowledge base.
Once this mapping is accomplished,
the button can be tied to the starting function.
Having indicated the correspondence
between interface components and the copier model,
all that remains is to set the number of copies
and push the Start button.
HITS provides the tools and the runtime environment
that makes this copier design environment possible.
The HITS platform allows the construction
of powerful, collaborative interfaces
and serves as a prototype environment for our research
on advanced interface design.