User Interface Management System Tools for Army Planning Applications

Increasingly, system designers and developers look to graphical user interface (GUI) technology to implement modern computer applications. But as software becomes easier to use, the development costs soar; for example, it is common to see the user interface constitute 60 % or more of applciation development costs. Though there have been significant recent advances in workstation technology and standardization of graphical software, full-functioned software tools to assist in developing GUIs are difficult to find. Of the tools that do exist, there is a glaring deficiency in that programmers--with considerable knoledge of the complexities of the underlying graphical software--are required to implement the user interface. The proposed project is for development of innovative software tools, the purpose of which is to increase productivity of the system developers and to increase the quality of the resulting user interfaces. The tools will cater to the non-programmer, so that end-users, system engineers, and human factors engineers may design and test GUIs from the end-user's perspective. The code name of this product is the "CHI Toolset", where CHI stands for "Computer/Human iNterface". The product will be based upon TAE Plus, a powerful and widely used UIMS developed for NASA by Century Computing.