Overcoming current growth limits in UI development
Alan Morse, George O. Reynolds · Communications of the ACM · 1993
OVERCOMING CURRENT GROWTH LIMITS IN Ul DEVELOPMENTthe years, Uls have grown to handle progressively more complicated tasks, making them more accessible and tractable.To see this, we need only compare the early line-oriented text editors with the document preparation systems that are widely available today.Computer novices are able to generate documents that only experts could have done just 10 years ag~ Much of this progress has been in appliance applications, which, although potentially complex, are straightforward compared to other problems arising today.These appliance applications typically deal with static domains with a simple structure, comprising a small number (10 to 20) of object classes.New applications will need to handle a dynamic (timevarying) state and a more complex structure, with hundreds of object classes.We already see this in some integrated PC applications, where spreadsheets and graphing packages can be combined into documents so that changes to one will be immediately reflected in the other.Moreover, there are industrial applications in which the number of object classes and degree of dynamism is an order of magnitude greater.As the number of interface components increases and the problem I t.