Coldewey Consulting Publications on User Interfaces
User Interface design has two different aspects. One is the human
interaction aspect that drives the basic concepts of the interface,
the screen layout (in the case you interact via screens), and the
actions a user can take. The second aspect is the design of the
software that drives these interactions. I have done some research on
popular designs and written them down using the concept of
patterns. These
patterns are beyond certain frameworks, such as IBM Visual Age or
Swing but describe basic concepts you often find. |
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User Interface Design
Concerning the design of human computer interfaces I recommend to study
Jennifer
Tidwell's work, which is the best work on this subject I have seen
so far.
Jens Coldewey, Ingolf Krüger:
in Frank Buschmann, Dirk Riehle (Eds.): Proceedings of the 2nd European
Conference on Pattern Languages of Programming; Bad Irsee 1997, Siemens
Technical Report 120/SW1/FB, 1997
Despite all the benefits of object-oriented user interfaces, there are
still domains that call for a form-based user interface. Business
information systems that support support fast processing of few,
well-defined use cases are typical examples. This paper helps to develop
the software architecture for such systems.
This paper does not represent my latest knowledge on pattern
writing anymore. Thanks to the help of Jim Coplien and many other guys I
was able to restructure the paper completly for the PLoP 98 conference.
Therefore I decided to provide only an online version of the
most recent paper on this subject.
Jens Coldewey:
Conference
on the Pattern Languages of Programming, 1998, Allerton Park,
Illinois
This pattern language explains the design of a user interface
architecture step by step into. I do not mean the layout of a user
interface. That's is a matter of ergonomics and has enough potential for a
complete set of pattern languages.
This paper is about the software that drives the user interface. The
most fundamental pattern is User Interface Layer. Separate
Transformation explains how to deal with complex interactions while
Widget Model helps to structure presentation. Though both
patterns seem to describe different philosophies, they are often combined
to form the basic structure of User Interface Layer. Still you need to
deal with more issues. First you must provide Context Support
between different interactions of the user. Depending on the requirements
and architecture of your system you can apply several patterns for this.
For the sake of brevity this document contains only thumbnails of them.
Another area of interest is Domain Layer Access, which again is
the foundation for several other patterns. While some of them are
well-known design patterns, others are special to user interfaces. This
set of patterns forms the coarse landscape of most architectures for user
interface structure.
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