USER INTERFACE: CONCEPTS AND SPECIFICATIONS

Abstract

A CAD/CAM/CAE system may be very powerful, but its acceptance among a user group depends heavily on its User Interface. It is very important that the User Interface of such a system can easily be adapted to the engineer's way of thinking and working. This paper presents the results of the development made at the Control Engineering Section of the Institute for Product Development at the Technical University of Denmark, in order to reach this goal. Modules which can easily be assembled to fulfil differentuser requirements for interaction with the system were developed. The basic building blocks in the input process - like a key stroke on the key board or a light pen interrupt - are hierarchicallycomposed into tokens and higher syntax constructs. Five basic processes are present at each level in the hierarchy: Prompting, echoing, input interpretation, information transmission to a higher level and error handling. Care was taken to clearly identify different interface levels to device dependent features, leaving the User Interface itself device independent.