Knowledge-based support for user adapted interaction design

The design of high quality user interfaces is increasingly becoming a knowledge-intensive task. Designers of user interfaces require tools to: (i) provide 'assistance' towards optimal decision making in varying design situations, (ii) 'critique' the quality of tentative design alternatives, (iii) 'propagate' and 'reuse' the accumulated design wisdom resulting from past experience, best practice and existing knowledge and (iv) 'automate' the design of certain aspects of the user-computer interaction. This paper briefly reviews the architecture and scope of a knowledge-based user interface design aid, called USE-IT and describes its knowledge base, the inference facilities and the data structures that are available for capturing and embedding design decisions into user interface implementation. USE-IT exhibits characteristic properties which cross the boundaries of the known categories of knowledge-based user interface design tools, such as user interface design assistants, user interface design critics or user interface design generators. The primary objective of USE-IT is to provide the user interface design team with a suit of toots allowing the consolidation of tentative designs, their re-use and incremental evolution, as well as the automatic generation of the lexical specification of a user interface. Such a specification can be subsequently consulted and interpreted by a user interface development toolkit so as to realize the specified lexical interactive behaviour on a target platform (e.g. MS-Windows). (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.