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Automatic generation of spatial configurations in user interfaces

The usability of graphical user interfaces relies to a large extent on the cognitively plausible visualisation of the application data structures, and in particular, the spatial arrangement of these visual elements. While the popularity of graphical interfaces has increased dramatically in recent years, the necessary design skills have not developed with the same pace. The thesis addresses this issue by introducing a formalised perspective on the design of spatial configurations. This formalisation of design follows the approach of model-based interface development, in which design knowledge is captured declaratively as a computational resource, which is used for various forms of automatic reasoning. In this thesis, we use automatic reasoning to generate spatial configurations from abstract, non-visual descriptions. This design-by-generation is based on the underlying assumption that spatial configurations are not only graphical phenomena, but also possess abstract, conceptual characteristics. Thus, the development of spatial configurations becomes a process of inferring the set of spatial structures that reflects the conceptual structures of the application visually. In the proposed approach, a crucial point is the identification of an appropriate form of conceptualisation. The method chosen here is to establish an analogy between spatial configurations and natural language. We show how the linguistic concepts of syntax, semantics and pragmatics can be employed to describe spatial configurations in an abstract fashion. A generator (based on feature structure unification) is devised that maps abstract descriptions to a well-defined, declarative model of spatial configurations that are suitable to reflect the conceptual information visually. The declarative model can be used further, for example, to produce executable interface code. A substantial part of the theoretical findings has been implemented in a prototype system providing the modelling formalisms, a modelling editor, and two spatial configuration generators (for the declarative model and procedural code). The feasibility of the approach is addressed in an evaluation study.