stanford hci group / cs376 research topics in human-computer interaction I/O Toolkits Scott Klemmer 29 November 2005

2 Recap: What are Interface Toolkits?  Goal: make it easier to develop user interfaces by providing application developers with reusable components that accomplish common input and output needs  Toolkits have a well-planned architecture and API & provide a library

3 Example: Java Swing  GUI toolkit with a widget set and an API

4 Example: M$ Interface Builder  Can specify widget placement and basic properties with a visual editor  Programmer writes code for widget callbacks and complex behaviors

5 Why use toolkits?  Code reuse saves programmer time  50% of code is for the GUI [Myers & Rosson, CHI ’92]  Consistent look & feel across apps  Easier to modify and iterate the UI  Make UI development accessible to more people  Non-artists  Non-programmers???

6 Drawbacks  Can be limiting – developers are likely to make the kinds of UIs that the toolkit makes easy  Traditional GUI toolkits are problematic for non-WIMP user interfaces such as:  Groupware  Physical UIs

7 DiamondSpin Toolkit  Toolkit for tabletop user interfaces  [Shen, Vernier, Forlines, Ringel] CHI ’04

8 Tabletop UI Needs  Multi-user support  Identity-aware widgets  Multiple menus  Public and personal spaces  Resolving conflicting actions  Arbitrary orientation of UI elements  Techniques to control orientation and layout  Rotation sensitive components

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10 DiamondSpin Video

11 iStuff Toolkit  Physical UI components for ubiquitous computing environments (multiple users, devices, and applications)  [Ballagas, Ringel, Stone, Borchers], CHI ‘03

12 iStuff Design  iStuff components  Device + proxy (“smarts” are in the proxy)  PatchPanel  Translate between iStuff events and application-specific events  Run-time retargetable events  Address dimension mismatches

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14 Evaluating Toolkits  Ease of use  A toolkit’s API is a user interface, too! [Klemmer et al., 2004] evaluated the API of Papier-Mache  Depth, Breadth, and Extensibility  Systems issues  Speed  Portability

15 Current Research Challenges  Complex design space  e.g., Do we have to update the toolkit every time someone creates a new sensor or actuator?  Ambiguous input  Speech, gestures, computer vision, etc. aren’t recognized as accurately as mouse clicks. Should the toolkit handle the recognition?

16 Summary  I/O Toolkits provide reusable interface components to simplify UI development  Toolkit trap: it’s tempting to only make UIs that the toolkit makes easy, instead of making what’s best for a specific app  Toolkit types:  WIMP (Garnet, Swing, Motif, etc)  Speciality (Phidgets, iStuff, Papier-Mache, DiamondSpin, GroupKit, Peripheral Displays Toolkit, etc)