Lean Cuisine: a low-fat notation for menus
Mark D. Apperley, Robert J Spence · Interacting with Computers · 1989
The specification, design, implementation and control of highly interactive direct manipulation dialogues is of increasing interest. However, existing techniques fall well short of the goal of isolating the design of the dialogue from the detail of its implementation. This paper closely analyses the structural characteristics of menu systems, a major component of such dialogues, and arising from this analysis proposes a new diagrammatic approach to their description. This approach is shown to be able to completely specify the details and behaviour of a system of menus from an external point of view. The parallels between this notation and the recently defined class of automata, Event-Response Systems, are discussed, demonstrating the potential for a direct implementation of an interface from this description. Further, it is suggested that the notation could be extended to cover all aspects of direct manipulation interaction.