TACTICS for User Interface Design: Coupling the Compositional and Transformational Approach

The paper describes TACTICS, the model and a model- based tool capable of supporting a wide range of design de- cisions and providing assistance in the design process. The TACTICS tool automatically generates a user interface for an application and assists in refining it and in detecting and resolving design inconsistencies. The TACTICS model of human-computer interaction integrates a compositional model of UIs and a transformational model of the UI de- sign space. A user interface is viewed as a composition of primitives structured based on the application and on the desired dialogue style, and the model identifies user inter- face components and structuring principles for assembling components into a coherent interface. The model also de- fines transformations that modify UI structures to achieve a desired look-and-feel and enable designers to easily explore different UI designs. The paper describes the knowledge structure of the model and the TACTICS approach to generating user interfaces. UI components are discussed and examples of UI structures given.