The development of interface design as an engineering discipline has been hampered by the absence of general, robust, and quantitative measures for the usefulness of interfaces. In the absence of such measures, it di cult to optimize an interface for a particular task, and to make precise statements about the relative advantages of di erent types of designs. This article brie y surveys the lite...

We present here the web-interface we designed and implemented to make it easier to access our data on P2P activity. In particular, this interface makes it browsable by browsing from files to related users, and conversely. Moreover, we include in this interface richer information which we precompute, like lists of files of interest for a given user, list of users providing a given file, list of ...

This article discusses the design of visual interfaces, using as an example the kaleidoscope program described in the first article of this series [1]. Good visual interface design is a difficult and complicated subject that is beyond the scope of this newsletter. In this and subsequent articles, we’ll illustrate common usage by example and comment from time to time on design considerations. Fo...

Although pilots regard pilot weather reports (PIREPs) as valuable flight planning resources, the number of PIREPs that pilots submit is relatively small. In a previous survey, pilots indicated that submitting PIREPs sometimes requires too much effort, and that they are often unable to recall the information fields required to complete a report. Pilots also indicated that the idea of submitting ...

This position paper discusses our experience in evaluating our cultural search and annotation engine. We identify three aspects that determine the quality of a semantic web application as a whole, namely: the quality of data set, the quality of underlying search and inference software and the quality of the user interface. We argue that evaluation of semantic web applications is particularly di...

This thesis presents SoundStrand, a novel tangible interface for composing music. A new paradigm is also presented one that allows for music composition with limited degrees of freedom, and therefore is well suited for music creation through the use of tangible interfaces. SoundStrand is comprised of a set of building blocks that represent pre-composed musical segments. By sequentially connecti...

This paper describes a friendly graphical interface for HAP, a rule-configurable planning system, which automatically adapts to each problem, in order to achieve best performance. HAP analyzes the problem and uses a rule system in order to make the most appropriate choices for planning. The graphical interface enables the user to use and even interfere in the process of fine tuning the planning...

Providing a knowledge-based mobile learning interface and content is a good way to expand the user participation in a science museum with a web-based system, especially as the internet and computing fields grow more and more diversely. There are many ways for providing museum to collect information, however some yield better knowledge and interesting content than others. This paper presents a p...