velden@bitter.serc.nl (Pietje van der Velden) (02/21/91)
At our institute we are developing an environment supporting the design and development of graphical user interfaces (UI) for interactive applications. The environment is called Digis: Direct Interactive Generation of Interactive Systems. The user of Digis is to be an interface designer: someone who is not a programmer, but an expert in ergonomics, "human factors" or design disciplines. Consequently, one of the main goals of Digis is that it has to be usable by non-programmers. In practice we experienced that UI-designers do not exist, or are at least very hard to find -- as far as we know the design of the UI is done by the application programmer. Therefore we want to ask the following questions: 1) Do UI-designers exist in real life (i.e.: specialists in designing, *not* application programmers). 2) If they do: what is his or her theoretical background (ergonomics, industrial design, ...)? 3) Does the designer use any tools; if so what kind of tools (e.g. a drawing application, widgets toolkit, ...). Any information on these questions is greatly appreciated. Please reply direct to velden@serc.nl. We'll summarize the replies if necessary. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Pietje van der Velden | Email: velden@serc.nl Software Engineering Research Centre (SERC) | Fax: +31 30 34 12 49 P.box 424 | 3500 AK Utrecht | The Netherlands |