Distributed User Interfaces

Written by international researchers in the field of Distributed User Interfaces (DUIs), this book brings together important contributions regarding collaboration and usability in Distributed User Interface settings. Throughout the thirteen chapters authors address key questions concerning how collaboration can be improved by using DUIs, including: in which situations a DUI is suitable to ease the collaboration among users; how usability standards can be used to evaluate the usability of systems based on DUIs; and accurately describe case studies and prototypes implementing these concerns. Under a collaborative scenario, users sharing common goals may take advantage of DUI environments to carry out their tasks more successfully because DUIs provide a shared environment where the users are allowed to manipulate information in the same space and at the same time. Under this hypothesis, collaborative DUI scenarios open new challenges to usability evaluation techniques and methods. Distributed User Interfaces: Collaboration and Usability presents an integrated view of different approaches related to Collaboration and Usability in Distributed User Interface settings, which demonstrate the state of the art, as well as future directions in this novel and rapidly evolving subject area.

The recent advances in display technologies and mobile devices is having an important effect on the way users interact with all kinds of devices (computers, mobile devices, laptops, tablets, and so on). These are opening up new possibilities for interaction, including the distribution of the UI (User Interface) amongst different devices, and implies that the UI can be split and composed, moved, copied or cloned among devices running the same or different operating systems. These new ways of manipulating the UI are considered under the emerging topic of Distributed User Interfaces (DUIs). DUIs are concerned with the repartition of one of many elements from one or many user interfaces in order to support one or many users to carry out one or many tasks on one or many domains in one or many contexts of use – each context of use consisting of users, platforms, and environments. The 20 chapters in the book cover between them the state-of-the-art, the foundations, and original applications of DUIs. Case studies are also included, and the book culminates with a review of interesting and novel applications that implement DUIs in different scenarios.

The success of a mobile application is due to the usability that the graphical user interface provides. A feature of mobile devices is the limited space for the interaction and the deployment of the graphical user interface. For this reason, user interfaces can have different interaction modalities. However, to work with information that can be complex to display, the use of modalities may not solve this problem. A possible alternative to provide more workspace to the users is through a distributed user interface (DUI). A mobile DUI allows the mobile applications to use two or more devices to execute the user interface. These devices can be Smart TVs or wearable such as smart watches. In this work the concepts of mobile DUI design are discussed, some use cases are presented and it is shown that its development in mobile devices is feasible.

Most programmers' fear of user interface (UI) programming comes from their fear of doing UI design. They think that UI design is like graphic design—the mysterious process by which creative, latte-drinking, all-black-wearing people produce cool-looking, artistic pieces. Most programmers see themselves as analytic, logical thinkers instead—strong at reasoning, weak on artistic judgment, and incapable of doing UI design. In this brilliantly readable book, author Joel Spolsky proposes simple, logical rules that can be applied without any artistic talent to improve any user interface, from traditional GUI applications to websites to consumer electronics. Spolsky's primary axiom, the importance of bringing the program model in line with the user model, is both rational and simple. In a fun and entertaining way, Spolky makes user interface design easy for programmers to grasp. After reading User Interface Design for Programmers, you'll know how to design interfaces with the user in mind. You'll learn the important principles that underlie all good UI design, and you'll learn how to perform usability testing that works.

Even at the beginning of the 21st century, we are far from becoming paperless. Pen and paper is still the only truly ubiquitous information processing technology. Pen-and-paper user interfaces bridge the gap between paper and the digital world. Rather than replacing paper with electronic media, they seamlessly integrate both worlds in a hybrid user interface. Classical paper documents become interactive. This opens up a huge field of novel computer applications at our workplaces and in our homes. This book provides readers with a broad and extensive overview of the field, so as to provide a full and up-to-date picture of pen-and-paper computing. It covers the underlying technologies, reviews the variety of modern interface concepts and discusses future directions of pen-and-paper computing. Based on the author’s award-winning dissertation, the book also provides the first theoretical interaction model of pen-and-paper user interfaces and an integrated set of interaction techniques for knowledge workers. The model proposes a ‘construction set’ of core interactions that are helpful in designing solutions that address the diversity of pen-and-paper environments. The interaction techniques, concrete instantiations of the model, provide innovative support for working with printed and digital documents. They integrate well-established paper-based practices with concepts derived from hypertext and social media. Researchers, practitioners who are considering deploying pen-and-paper user interfaces in real-world projects, and interested readers from other research disciplines will find the book an invaluable reference source. Also, it provides an introduction to pen-and-paper computing for the academic curriculum. The present book was overdue: a thorough, concise, and well-organized compendium of marriages between paper-based and electronic documents. Max Mühlhäuser, Technische Universität Darmstadt Everyone interested in how to design for real-world activities would profit from reading this book. James D. Hollan, University of California, San Diego

Abstract: "Computing systems have changed rapidly since the first graphical user interfaces were developed. Hardware has become faster and software architectures have become more flexible and more open; a modern computing system consists of many communicating machines rather than a central host. Understanding of human-computer interaction has also become more sophisticated and places new demands on interactive software; these include, in particular, support for multi-user applications, continuous media, and 'ubiquitous' computing. The layer which binds user requirements and computing systems together, the user interface, has not changed as quickly; few user interface architectures can easily support the new requirements placed on them and few take advantage of the facilities offered by advanced computing systems. Experiences of implementing systems with unusual user interfaces have shown that current window system models are only a special case of possible user interface architectures. These window systems are too strongly tied to assumptions about how users and computers interact to provide a suitable platform for further evolution. Users and application builders may reasonably expect to be able to use multiple input and output devices as their needs arise. Experimental applications show that flexible user interface architectures, which can support multiple devices and users, can be built without excessive implementation and processing costs. This dissertation describes Gemma, a model for a new generation of interactive systems that are not confined to virtual terminals but allows collections of independent devices to be bound together for the task at hand. It provides mediated shared access to basic devices and higher-level virtual devices so that people can share computational facilities in the real world, rather than in a virtual world. An example window system shows how these features may be exploited to provide a flexible, collaborative and mobile interactive environment."

The truly world-wide reach of the Web has brought with it a new realisation of the enormous importance of usability and user interface design. In the last ten years, much has become understood about what works in search interfaces from a usability perspective, and what does not. Researchers and practitioners have developed a wide range of innovative interface ideas, but only the most broadly acceptable make their way into major web search engines. This book summarizes these developments, presenting the state of the art of search interface design, both in academic research and in deployment in commercial systems. Many books describe the algorithms behind search engines and information retrieval systems, but the unique focus of this book is specifically on the user interface. It will be welcomed by industry professionals who design systems that use search interfaces as well as graduate students and academic researchers who investigate information systems.

"Developing User Interfaces" is targeted at the programmer who will actually implement, rather than design, the user-interface. Useful to programmers using any language--no particular windowing system or toolkit is presumed, examples are drawn from a variety of commercial systems, and code examples are presented in pseudo-code. The basic concepts of traditional computer graphics such as drawing and 3D modeling are covered for readers without a computer graphics background.