User Interface Management Systems: Survey and Assessment

The term User Interface Management System (UIMS), coined in 1982, referred to a software strategy for dialogue control in computer-user interaction. The strategy attempted to separate specification of dialogue sequences from application development. The concept spawned much further work, intended to generalize the strategy to other applications. Many UlMSs were since reported in the literature, and meaning of the term UlMS was also changing, from a strategy for application development to an integrated system of tools for user interface (UI) design. The paper gives a historical account. The intended separation of dialogue control sequencing from application development is hardly successful in any general sense. The functional distinctions between dialogue control and application program are still very much unclear. Yet UlMS work has made an impact in our views toward application development. We recognized the role of UI design, for which most programmers were not trained. Since the requirements for UI are often inherently fuzzy, the only reliable test for UI quality is in testing by end-users. There is evidently the need for application development to be user oriented: to build UI software around the user, and to test early UI prototypes by end-users to support iterative re-design. Much of UIMS work therefore concentrated in the UI design tools, and the integration of UI design into application development. The paper adopts a classification of UlMSs by the tools for UI design, and presents a survey.