Rapid user interface development with the script language Gist
Gijsbert Bos · 1993
All user interfaces have to be designed. This seemingly empty statement still holds a lesson, because all too often programmers just implement the first idea they have, without asking themselves if there are alternatives. Programmers are not typical users, and even if they try to place themselves in the user’s position, what seems a good choice at rst may turn out to be less than optimal in the long run. User interface design can be approached from different perspectives. There is the view from sociology: how do computers infuence the behaviour of their users? Do computers make tasks more enjoyable, easier, and less stressful? Psychology can look at the way people’s skills, learning ability and character are cooperating with or working against certain styles of interaction. Ergonomics studies the relation between various measures of people’s abilities to perform a task and measurable properties of their tools, both hardware and software. Last, but not least, there is computer science, which concentrates on the hardware and software that makes various styles of interaction possible. Computer science studies effIciency both with respect to the machine and with respect to the user; it creates new methods and develops the coordination between software, documentation and training. A book on Human Computer Interaction (hci) could focus on many aspects of the interface between computers and people. This book only treats interfaces (software only) that are created for traditional and widely available hardware, viz., keyboard, screen and mouse. It brings ideas from the above mentioned four disciplines together, but it focusses on the computer science side. Insights borrowed from all of them result in a list of desired features, but it is not possible to give exact rules about what is good in interface design and what isn’t: science just has not progressed that far. But we can create the means to experiment, to create different interfaces easily, so we can empirically find out what is best in concrete situations. The purpose of the book, then, is to provide means to design good, user-friendly interfaces. An additional goal is to provide these means to programmers and non-programmers alike, in other words: the tools themselves should be easy to use. The book describes various systems that have been created with this or a similar goal in mind and compares them to the system that the author himself developed.