UI Methods and Architecture

Architecture, the use of planning and principle to guide construction, is just as useful in constructing software as it is in constructing buildings. Just as architecture guides building construction towards a result that is useful, safe, useable, predictable, and cost-effective, so too can software architecture guide the construction of software systems. The discussion on architecture explores UI (user interface) architecture and its relationship to software architecture.

Guiding System Construction

HCI techniques help to guide the construction of useful and usable systems. HCI, with its user-centric viewpoint, provides the methods needed to describe how a system should relate to its human users and to their domain terminology and tasks. Object technology, with its focus on system design and implementation that more easily maps to the real world, provides a lingua franca for binding HCI user descriptions to the remainder of the system architecture. For an overview of HCI methods of requirements specification and user interface design, augmented by object technology approaches, see the Methods portion of this topic area.

To gain a better understanding of how software construction is accomplished and how software construction processes can be taylored to specific projects, it is useful to look at formal descriptions of the development process. Process provides a generic discussion of the software development process from inception to deployment.