A Linguistic Perspective to Develop Graphical User Interfaces

in 1986, Jacob Nielsen proposed a virtual protocol for computer-human interaction. His protocol aims at analyzing and understanding the interaction between the human and the computer based on linguistic criteria. Our research elaborates on his protocol to investigate the abilities and capabilities of employing a linguistic perspective in building graphical user interfaces with enhanced traceability and maintainability qualities. These qualities enhance the ability to modify a graphical user interface like in the case of adaptation to different contexts of use (adaptability) or others. This paper introduces an adapted linguistic protocol for graphical user interfaces that is refined from the original work of Nielsen. The adapted protocol serves as a linguistic taxonomy of graphical user interfaces concepts, elements and artifacts that we employ in classifying these elements and concepts. This classification is vital towards modeling user interfaces from a linguistic perspective.