Delays and temporal incoherence due to the mediated status-status mappings

ABSTRACT

The paper describes how the identification of 'status-status mappings' early in the specification and design of an interactive system can highlight potential temporal problems in the interface. These problems arise because without infinitely fast computation and communication, any constraints between status in the interface are bound to be violated some of the time. This violation will at best be a slight lag between the source of a change and its display and at worst may lead to inconsistency between parts of the interface. We identify the ways in which status-status mappings are violated and the way in which they are mediated by events in the implementation of a system. This enables the designer to control the eventual behaviour of the system and avoid the worst pitfalls.

REFERENCES

• 1: Gregory D. Abowd , Alan J. Dix, Integrating status and event phenomena in formal specifications of interactive systems, Proceedings of the 2nd ACM SIGSOFT symposium on Foundations of software engineering, p.44-52, December 06-09, 1994, New Orleans, Louisiana, United States
• 2: A. Dix and S. A. Brewster (1994). Causing Trouble with Buttons. Ancillary Proceedings of HCI'94, Glasgow.
• 3: Alan Dix , Janet Finlay , Gregory Abowd , Russell Beale, Human-computer interaction, Prentice-Hall, Inc., Upper Saddle River, NJ, 1997
• 4: A. J. Dix (1991). Formal Methods for Interactive Systems. Academic Press.
• 5: Alan J. Dix, Beyond the Interface, Proceedings of the IFIP TC2/WG2.7 Working Conference on Engineering for Human-Computer Interaction, p.171-190, August 10-12, 1992
• 6: Ralph D. Hill, The Rendezvous constraint maintenance system, Proceedings of the 6th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology, p.225-234, December 1993, Atlanta, Georgia, United States [doi>10.1145/168642.168665]
• 7: Brad A. Myers , Dario A. Giuse , Roger B. Dannenberg , David S. Kosbie , Edward Pervin , Andrew Mickish , Brad Vander Zanden , Philippe Marchal, Garnet: Comprehensive Support for Graphical, Highly Interactive User Interfaces, Computer, v.23 n.11, p.71-85, November 1990 [doi>10.1109/2.60882]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.1 MODELS AND PRINCIPLES

General Terms:
Design, Human Factors, Management