Interface Management through Automated Generation and Evaluation (IMAGE)

Configuration Management for User Interface (UI) design must go beyond traditional version control and traceability to include enforcement of style rules, assessment of required coverage and evaluation of compatibility and consistency with other systems or prior UI versions for similar tasks. SIFT has more 20 years experience developing and fielding interface evaluation and generation aids. We have developed a core representation and reasoning capability for describing the information needs of tasks, the information provided by displays and for computing the degree of match between the two. Furthermore, we describe methods, some used in prior projects, for performing sophisticated and traceable tradeoff reasoning among competing goals in UI generation. With these methods, UI evaluation and generation are closely related—it requires little additional effort to achieve one mode of interaction vs. the other. We explain these approaches and propose methods for using them, with innovative augmentation and integration into the Navy’s SOA environment, to provide IMAGE (Interface Management through Automated Generation and Evaluation) for UI configuration management of the advanced types described above. IMAGE will be developed together with Lockheed Martin Maritime Systems and Sensors for Navy submarine systems—notionally beginning with UIs for the Common Submarine Radio Room.