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    The integration of task and dialogue modelling in the early stages of user interface design : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2003) Scogings, Christopher John
    In the early stages of the design of graphical user interfaces, models and notations are required for describing user tasks and for describing the structure of the human-computer dialogue to support these tasks. These descriptions should ideally be linked, but in practice task modelling and dialogue modelling are conducted in isolation with differing notations. The research reported in this thesis reviews both task and dialogue modelling and describes how the divide between the two can be bridged via the Lean Cuisine+ notation. Lean Cuisine+ was developed as a semi-formal graphical notation for describing the underlying behaviour of direct manipulation user interfaces (Phillips, 1995). The notation has a significant advantage over other dialogue modelling notations in that it can represent task sequences within the context of the dialogue structure and hence bring dialogue modelling and task modelling together. The research describes how Lean Cuisine+ has been analysed and modified in order to simplify it and to make it more suitable for use with a supporting software tool. There exists a significant gap between user interface design and the design of entire software applications. This is true even for the latest software engineering notation, UML, which has become the de facto industry standard. The thesis reviews UML and reveals its shortcomings regarding support for user interface design. The research suggests a solution for the problem by proposing a method for the early stages of user interface design that uses Lean Cuisine+, in order to combine both task and dialogue modelling, and is constructed to form an integral part of the overall software design process advocated by the authors of UML. The method is applied to two case studies. A prototype Software Environment for Lean Cuisine+ with UML (SELCU) has been developed to enable the construction, storage, editing and printing of Lean Cuisine+ specifications, and to partially support the method. The thesis describes the design, implementation and use of this software support environment. Finally, preliminary work by the author on the automatic generation of Lean Cuisine+ specifications is reported. This shows promise, and has been further developed recently in associated masters-level research in which extensions to SELCU have been implemented.
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    A calculation of colours: towards the automatic creation of graphical user interface colour schemes : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2010) Moretti, Giovanni S.
    Interface colour scheme design is complex, but important. Most software allows users to choose the colours of single items individually and out of context, but does not acknowledge colour schemes or aid in their design. Creating colour schemes by picking individual colours can be time-consuming, error-prone, and frustrating, and the results are often mediocre, especially for those without colour design skills. Further, as colour harmony arises from the interactions between all of the coloured elements, anticipating the overall eff ect of changing the colour of any single element can be difficult. This research explores the feasibility of extending artistic colour harmony models to include factors pertinent to user interface design. An extended colour harmony model is proposed and used as the basis for an objective function that can algorithmically assess the colour relationships in an interface colour scheme. Its assessments have been found to agree well with human evaluations and have been used as part of a process to automatically create harmonious and usable interface colour schemes. A three stage process for the design of interface colour schemes is described. In the fi rst stage, the designer speci es, in broad terms and without requiring colour design expertise, colouring constraints such as grouping and distinguishability that are needed to ensure that the colouring of interface elements reflects their semantics. The second stage is an optimisation process that chooses colour relationships to satisfy the competing requirements of harmonious colour usage, any designer-specified constraints, and readability. It produces sets of coordinates that constitute abstract colour schemes: they de fine only relationships between coloured items, not real colours. In the third and fi nal stage, a user interactively maps an abstract scheme to one or more real colour schemes. The colours can be fi ne-tuned as a set (but not altered individually), to allow for such "soft" factors as personal, contextual and cultural considerations, while preserving the integrity of the design embodied in the abstract scheme. The colours in the displayed interface are updated continuously, so users can interactively explore a large number of colour schemes, all of which have readable text, distinguishable controls, and conform to the principles of colour harmony. Experimental trials using a proof-of-concept implementation called the Colour Harmoniser have been used to evaluate a method of holistic colour adjustment and the resulting colour schemes. The results indicate that the holistic controls are easy to understand and eff ective, and that the automatically produced colour schemes, prior to fi ne-tuning, are comparable in quality to many manually created schemes, and after fi ne-tuning, are generally better. By designing schemes that incorporate colouring constraints specifi ed by the user prior to scheme creation, and enabling the user to interactively fi ne-tune the schemes after creation, there is no need to specify or incorporate the subtle and not well understood factors that determine whether any particular set of colours is "suitable". Instead, the approach used produces broadly harmonious schemes, and defers to the developer in the choice of the fi nal colours.