Facilitating Work-Centered Interface Development through Patterns

We propose a novel work-centered interface development environment that will dramatically reduce the complexity of interaction design. To this end, we will support an enhanced Contextual Design process with a set of tools that will enable developers todraw on the aggregate experience of other work-centered interface designers. This will be achieved through the collection and application of proven design/interaction patterns that will, among other things, enable developers to resolve the conflictsbetween agent autonomy and user control requirements. Further, WorkWell will provide an intuitive incremental process for the ontology development and semantic mapping that will be essential to the creation of homogeneous interfaces to the veryheterogeneous JBI resources. We will ground our efforts in a domain that we know very well - Defensive Information Warfare (DIW). There is currently a great need for work-centered interfaces that can help network security professionals cope with the greatquantity and diversity of data that must be analyzed, as well as incredibly short decision cycles. Our Phase I investigation will result in a detailed work-centered interface development procedure that will form the foundation for the full-scaleimplementation of WorkWell, as well as a specification of the target DIW interface.This technology is valuable to any organization where users must operate in information dense and time critical environments. WorkWell will allow the application ofwork-centered design techniques within today's time-constrained software development.