User Interfaces for Component-Based Design Tools

Researchers:	Stephen Neuendorffer
Advisor:	Edward A. Lee

Designing an intuitive and powerful user interface is a challenging task. The learning curve for novice users should be small, and yet expert users should have easy access to advanced functionality. Component-based design tools pose a particular challenge for interface design because of their immaturity. Since the underlying tools are changing, the interface must be easily configurable and extensible. Furthermore, the interface should not require significant addition of user-interface code when new features are added to the underlying tools.

The goal of this work is to create a user interface for Ptolemy II that is rich and powerful, yet also intuitive and relatively simple to learn. The approach is to put heavy emphasis on developing a clean, modular, and extensible software architecture. Emphasis will be placed on direct manipulation of the component-based architecture, including on-line editing of executing models. State of the art techniques in interface design will be used to evaluate and improve the design. For consistency and ease of implementation, the interface will be based on Java/Swing and the Diva graphics framework. An XML file format will form the basis for persistent file storage.

Although this work will be an important part of Ptolemy II, it is intended to be sufficiently general to be applicable to other design tools, and to enable further research into visualization and collaboration in the design of component-based models.

Last updated 11/05/99