Scientists in the MIST: Simplifying Interface Design for End Users

Bhatia, Saurabh and McCrickard, D. Scott and Lilley, Tripp and North, Chris and Kienzle, Paul (2006) Scientists in the MIST: Simplifying Interface Design for End Users. Technical Report TR-06-13, Computer Science, Virginia Tech, NIST.

Abstract

We are building a Malleable Interactive Software Toolkit (MIST), a tool set and infrastructure to simplify the design and construction of dynamically-reconfigurable (malleable) interactive software. Malleable software offers the end-user powerful tools to reshape their interactive environment on the fly. We aim to make the construction of such software straightforward, and to make reconfiguration of the resulting systems approachable and manageable to an educated, but non-specialist, user. To do so, we draw on a diverse body of existing research on alternative approaches to user interface (UI) and interactive software construction, including declarative UI languages, constraint-based programming and UI management, reflection and data-driven programming, and visual programming techniques.