Research – Past and Ongoing
User interface design has been a topic of considerable research, including on its aesthetics. In the past standards have been developed, as far back as the eighties for defining the usability of software products. One of the structural basis has become the IFIP userinterface reference model. The model proposes four dimensions to structure the user interface:
- The input/output dimension (the look)
- The dialogue dimension (the feel)
- The technical or functional dimension (the access to tools and services)
- The organizational dimension (the communication and co-operation support)
This model has greatly influenced the development of the international standard ISO 9241 describing the interface design requirements for usability. The desire to understand application-specific UI issues early in software development, even as an application was being developed, led to research on GUI rapid prototyping tools that might offer convincing simulations of how an actual application might behave in production use. Some of this research has shown that a wide variety of programming tasks for GUI-based software can, in fact, be specified through means other than writing program code.
Research in recent years is strongly motivated by the increasing variety of devices that can, by virtue of Moore's Law, host very complex interfaces.
There is also research on generating user interfaces automatically, to match a user's level of ability for different kinds of interaction.
Read more about this topic: User Interface Design
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