05-830, User Interface Software, Spring, 2001
Lecture 14,   April 9, 2001
Copyright © 2001 - Brad A. Myers

Demonstrational Tools

Overview

• Direct Manipulation allows properties to be set by directly moving objects with the mouse and setting properties
  • Example: interface builders,  Visual Basic
• Limited to static parts of the interface
  • No way to point at objects that will be drawn by the user
  • How set the color of an object in Visual Basic at run time?
    
  
• Demonstrational Tools allow the user to operate on example objects which represent objects that are created at run-time.
  • For example, the system must find out that the size of the boxes depends on the actual labels typed by the user and where the lines attach.
  • In general, demonstrational systems allow the user to operate on examples, and then generalizes to produce a general-purpose procedure or prototype.
• "Examples":
  • draw an example of the objects that will be created at run time
  • draw objects in approximately the right places, and systems creates general constraints
• This is a hard problem, which is why you don't see many commercial products that do this.
• There are also demonstrational systems for other domains (not for creating UIs):
  • Our group:
    • Text editing (Tourmaline, Andy Werth INI MS thesis)
    • Creating shell programs (Francesmary Modugno's PhD thesis on "Pursuit")
    • Creating custom business charts and graphs (patent on this technology)
    • Creating user interfaces and other code
    • WWW cgi and "agent" scripts (promising area for future research)
  • Others:
    • Text editing (renumber by example, styles)
    • Graphical editing (graphical procedures)
    • Determining loops in HyperCard ("Eager")
    • etc.
• "Classic" Reference: Allen Cypher, ed.Watch What I Do, MIT Press.
• New book, next year: Henry Lieberman, ed. Your Wish is My Command. 2001: Morgan Kaufmann.

Motivation

• Demonstrational techniques expand how much of the interface can be specified interactively.
• And Interactive editors are much faster to use than programming with toolkits
  • Frameworks improve productivity by factors of 3 to 5, interactive tools by factors of 10 to 50!
  • It might take an hour to draw an interface interactively, compared to days to program it.
  • Because they are faster, this promotes rapid prototyping
• It is much more natural to specify the graphical parts of applications using a graphical editor.
• Because they do not require programming skills, graphic designers can design the graphical parts of the interface.

Examples (of uses to create UIs)

• (chronological order)
• Peridot (1986-88)
  • Myers B. "Creating User Interfaces Using Programming-by-Example, Visual Programming, and Constraints," ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems. vol. 12, no. 2, April, 1990. pp. 143-177.  (Peridot)
  • Myers B., Creating User Interfaces by Demonstration, Academic Press, San Diego, 1988.
  • Myers B., "Creating Interaction Techniques by Demonstration," IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, Vol. 7, No. 9, IEEE, September 1987, pp. 51 - 60.
  • First demonstrational tool, and it used by-example techniques to allow the creation of new widgets.
  • - From the drawings, it infers
    • Graphical constraints among the objects, such as that the boxes should be the same size as the text.
    • control structures such as iteration over all the items in a menu
    • how the mouse affects the graphics, such as that the check mark should follow the mouse.
  • feedback: question and answer
  • video (8 min)
• Lapidary (1989-1993)
  • Myers B., Vander Zanden B. and Dannenberg R., "Creating Graphical Interactive Application Objects by Demonstration," Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, UIST'89, Williamsburg, November 1989, pp. 95 - 104.
  • Brad Vander Zanden and Brad A. Myers. "Demonstrational and Constraint-Based Techniques for Pictorially Specifying Application Objects and Behaviors," ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction. vol. 2, no. 4, Dec, 1995. pp. 308-356.
  • Extends Peridot to allow the creation of application-specific graphical objects, like nodes in a graphics editor.
  • Uses less inferencing and more dialog boxes
  • Is "real" and you get it as part of the Garnet distribution
  • Problems:
    • can only demonstrate "syntactic" parts of application
    • hard to set up correct constraints
  • video (3 min)
• DEMO and DEMO II (1991, 1992)
  • David A. Wolber and Gene L. Fisher, "Demonstrational Technique for Developing Interfaces with Dynamically Created Objects," Proceedings UIST'91: ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, Nov, 1992, Monterey, CA, pp. 89-97.
  • Gene L. Fisher, Dale E. Busse, and David A. Wolber, "Adding Rule-Based Reasoning to a Demonstrational Interface Builder," Proceedings UIST'92: ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, Nov, 1991, pp. 221-230.
  • DEMO was first system to support dynamic creation of objects.
  • Infers graphical relationships by examples of edits
  • DEMO-II adds extensive inferencing of graphical constraints from examples
• Marquise (1993-1994)
  • Myers B., McDaniel, R. and Kosbie, D.. "Marquise: Creating Complete User Interfaces by Demonstration," Proceedings CHI'94: Human Factors in Computing Systems. Amsterdam, The Netherlands, April 24-29, 1993. pp. 293-300.
  • Go back to doing more by demonstration, and just show the way that the interface should operate.
  • In particular, demonstrate when the behaviors should start and what the feedback looks like.
    • mouse button does one of 10 things, depending on where press and global mode.
  • Demonstrate both behavior and conditions
  • Built-in support for palettes and modes.
  • video (3 min)
• InferenceBear & Grizzly Bear (1994-1996)
  • Martin Frank and Jim Foley, "Model-Based User Interface Design by Example and By Interview," Proceedings UIST'93: ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology. Atlanta, GA, Nov. 3-5, 1993, pp. 129-137.
  • Martin Frank, Model-Based User Interface Design by Demonstration and By Interview. PhD Thesis, Georgia Tech, 1996.
  • (Discussed his "Elements, Events & Transitions (EET) language in the event-language lecture)
  • User control through dialog boxes, edit using textual language: EET
  • Snapshots of before and after
  • Multiple examples
    • More positive examples to cause generalization
    • Negative examples to specify exceptions
  • pictures
• Pavlov (1995-present)
  • David Wolber, "Pavlov: Programming by Stimulus-Response Demonstration," Proceedings CHI'96, Human Factors in Computing Systems. April 1996. pp. 252-259
  • Stimulus from mouse or time-based
  • Score editor for feedback and editing
  • video (2 min)
• Gamut (1996 - 1999)
  • PhD thesis of Rich McDaniel.
  • Richard G. McDaniel and Brad A. Myers. "Building Applications Using Only Demonstration," IUI'98: 1998 International Conference On Intelligent User Interfaces, January 6-9, 1998, San Francisco, CA. pp. 109-116. postscript
  • Richard G. McDaniel and Brad A. Myers, "Getting More Out Of Programming-By-Demonstration." Proceedings CHI'99: Human Factors in Computing Systems. Pittsburgh, PA, May 15-20, 1999. pp. 442-449. postscript
  • Domain: "board games" and educational software
  • Goal: new interaction techniques so can infer more complex behaviors
  • E.g., how a piece can move in Monopoly / Chess
  • Reduce number of modes
  • New interaction techniques to provide hints
    • "Do Something!", "Stop That", Hint highlighting, Temporal Ghosts, Guide objects, Deck of Playing Cards, etc.
  • Better inferencing algorithms
  • video (8 min)

Open Issues

• How intelligent is enough?
  • Predictability
  • AI problem
• Techniques for feedback and editing
• Combining inferencing with direct editing of the code
• A "really" successful product using this technology

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