Scalable user interface

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A scalable user interface (or ZUI for " Zoomable User Interface " for short ) comes from the IT sector and describes a graphical user interface (GUI) with the additional option of zooming individual elements or the entire surface. A ZUI can have different degrees of scaling that are controlled by the user. A ZUI requires additional input from the user to control zoom and pan .

The ZUI is seen as a more intuitive and flexible alternative to the classic GUI. The effort for the development of ZUIs is higher, which is why more work is currently being put into the further development of conventional GUIs.

The requirements of a user interface are regulated according to the international guideline ISO 9241-10ff.

definition

User interfaces that meet one of the following points are considered to be ZUI.

  • Control elements are located on a work surface that can be zoomed and moved horizontally and vertically (English Pan).
  • At least one element contains scalable components.

Synonyms

The correct designation for ZUIs is Scalable Graphical User Interface or Scalable Graphical User Interface , but for the sake of simplicity the phrase "graphical" is dispensed with. Additional terms for ZUIs are scalable user interface , in English the terms zoomable user interface , zooming user interface and multiscale interface are common.

history

The history of the ZUIs is linked to the history of the GUI. Ivan Sutherland developed Sketchpad in 1963 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) , which is now considered the first GUI to have a zoom function. The so-called fisheye zooming was defined by George W. Furnas in 1981 and is often used in ZUIs. In 1991 David Fox and Ken Perlin developed Pad at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University . Pad is considered the first ZUI. With Pad and the further development Pad ++, multimedia data can be displayed on a two-dimensional level. Pad already used semantic scaling (see below). At the Human-Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL), Pad was continued by the Jazz project and ported to Java. The newest ZUI library of the HCIL is Piccolo, which simplified the programming of ZUIs considerably compared to Jazz. Piccolo is available as an open source library for Java and C # .

ZUI elements

ZUIs usually have primitive elements that can be used to compile control elements. Depending on the programming library, these elements can be provided with event handlers for mouse and keyboard inputs, as well as animated and transformed, just like in a GUI library .

  • Paths: These can represent simple edges, filled rectangles, polygons and even Bezier curves .
  • text
  • bitmap

Depending on the programming library, elements of GUIs can be used in a ZUI. The Piccolo Toolkit, for example, offers wrappers in the C # programming language for operating elements of the GDI graphic interface .

  • button
  • Checkbox
  • Radio button

See also : GUI elements

Semantic scaling

The semantic scaling (English semantic zooming ) is a technique of the ZUIs to represent objects depending on the degree of scaling in different levels of detail. This gives a good overall view of the information, but on closer inspection an object is very detailed; H. Information is shown or hidden depending on the scaling. Programmers use this possibility to improve the performance of their programs and to create a better overview.

List of ZUI libraries

Many ZUI programming libraries are increasingly relying on graphs, which enable a structured view in flowcharts .

  • Piccolo Toolkit - A Structured 2D Graphics Framework - programming library for Java and C #. Piccolo is available under the free BSD license .
  • Ziteboard is a device-independent, web-based whiteboard with zoom function and the possibility of collaboration in real time, written in pure html5 and javascript.
  • Jazz Toolkit from the University of Maryland's Human Computer Interaction Lab. Jazz is a predecessor of the Piccolo Toolkit implemented in Java. Further development has been discontinued, but the sources are still accessible.
  • ZVTM - Zoomable Visual Transformation Machine
  • Zomit - Java ZUI library

literature

  • George W. Furnas; The FISHEYE view: a new look at structured files; Bell Laboratories Technical Memorandum # 81-11221-9; 1981
  • George W. Furnas; Generalized Fisheye Views; CHI'86 p.16-24; 1986
  • Jef Raskin; The intelligent interface; Addison-Wesley, Munich 2001, ISBN 3-8273-1796-7
  • The ZUI-related literature page of the people around Ben Shneiderman (e.g. Ben Bederson) http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/piccolo/learn/publications.shtml

Web links