Abstract
Most software applications present information to the user in a WYSIWYG form, where the main representation on the screen is made as close as possible to a visual facsimile of the final work product. Wherever possible, users specify required transformations of the product by directly selecting and manipulating areas of this visual facsimile. This brings great usability advantages, but is not adequate for the specification of abstract operations such as generalization and inference commands, which are usually represented linguistically in menus and dialogues. We report a series of experimental implementations exploring alternatives to menus and dialogues. In these six systems, abstract functionality is integrated into the work context through two techniques: diagrammatic interpretation of user’s actions (gestures) and diagrammatic overlays superimposed as semi-transparent layers over the visual presentation of the work product. We discuss the diagrammatic justifications and consequences of these alternatives, and present results of preliminary user studies suggesting that both forms of interaction may in future be valuable techniques for exploiting diagrammatic formalisms in software interaction.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Aish, R. Custom objects: A model-oriented end-user programming environment. Presented at The Visual End User workshop, IEEE Visual Languages, Seattle (2000)
Blackwell, A.F. Pictorial representation and metaphor in visual language design. Journal of Visual Languages and Computing 12 (2001) 475–499
Blackwell, A.F. See What You Need: Helping end users to build abstractions. Journal of Visual Languages and Computing 12 (2001) 223–252
Blackwell, A.F. Metacognitive theories of visual programming: What do we think we are doing? In Proceedings IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages (1996) 240–246
Blackwell, A.F., Green, T.R.G. Investment of attention as an analytic approach to cognitive dimensions. In T. Green, R. Abdullah & P. Brna (Eds.) Collected Papers of the 11th Annual Workshop of the Psychology of Programming Interest Group (1999) 24–35
Blackwell, A.F., Hague, R. AutoHAN: An architecture for programming the home. In Proc. IEEE Symposia on Human-Centric Computing Languages & Environments (2001) 150–157
Brooks, F.P. No silver bullet — essence and accidents of software engineering. Computer 20(4), (1987) 10–19. Reprinted from Proc. IFIP Congress, Dublin, Ireland, 1986.
Do, E.Y-L. What’s in a diagram that a computer should understand? In Proc. Sixth Ann. Conference on Computer Aided Architectural Design Futures, Singapore. (1995) 469–482
Green, T.R.G., Blackwell, A.F. Ironies of abstraction. Presentation at 3rd International Conference on Thinking. British Psychological Society, London (1996)
Green, T.R.G., Blackwell, A.F. Design for usability using Cognitive Dimensions. Tutorial presented at HCI’98, Sheffield UK (1998)
Green, T.R.G., Petre, M. Usability analysis of visual programming environments: a “cognitive dimensions” approach. Journal of Visual Languages and Computing 7 (1996) 131–174
Igarashi, T., Matsuoka, S., Tanaka, H. Teddy: A sketching interface for 3D freeform design. Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH (1999)
Kahneman, D., Tversky, A. Prospect theory: an analysis of decision under risk. Econometrica 47 (1979) 263–291.
Mo, D.H., Witten, I.H. Learning text editing tasks from examples: a procedural approach. Behaviour and Information Technology 11 (1992) 32–45
Nix, R.P. Editing by example. ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (1985) 600–621
Porter, T., Duff, T. Compositing digital images. Computer Graphics 18 (1984) 253–259
Shneiderman, B. Direct manipulation: A step beyond programming languages. IEEE Computer 16 (1983) 57–69
Zhang, R.Z., Tsai, P., Cryer, J.E., Shah, M. Shape from shading: A survey. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 21 (1999) 690–706
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2002 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Blackwell, A.F., Wallach, H. (2002). Diagrammatic Integration of Abstract Operations into Software Work Contexts. In: Hegarty, M., Meyer, B., Narayanan, N.H. (eds) Diagrammatic Representation and Inference. Diagrams 2002. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 2317. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-46037-3_21
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-46037-3_21
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-43561-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-46037-4
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive