GUIs: The Design Process

Just like any other software system a system with a graphic user interface needs to be designed in a structured way. The following picture from Collins's book illustrates the steps in terms of related processes and deliverables.

A more detailed (text description) of the life cycle of a system is drawn from Schneiderman's book. The effective desing of user interfcaes depends on being able to integrate the user's conceptual model, the interface and the system model. The SSOA model gives a conceptual modle that can be used for this and the MVC model gives a more implementation driven view.

Aims of the Design Process

The rest of this page discusses the aims of the design process.

Other Topics

• The OOUI Team
• Task Analysis
• The Conceptual Model
• Information Presentation
• Interaction and Control Mechanisms

The basic steps in the design of an object oriented system are

• What are the objects?
• How do the objects interact with each other?
• How are objects similar to one another?
• How do objects fit together into structures?
• How should objects be presented to the user, in terms of appearance and interaction behaviour?

In an idealized version of the process there is a series of isomorphisms between each of the following:

1. The Conceptual Model
2. The Visible User interface Classes
3. View/Controller Classes.
4. The system implementation classes
5. The database Object types

Items 2 and 3 make up the User Interface model and items 4 and 5 make up the information model.

Return to GUI home page.

Last Changed: 1 May 1995