Visually specifying human-computer dialogues in DIGIS

DIGIS is a user interface development environment for non-programmers, covering all aspects of user-interface construction: presentation, dialogues and coupling to the application, using direct manipulation techniques. DIGIS enforces a strict separation of the user interface from the application, with no restrictions on the type of application, although we assume that the application can be modeled in an object oriented way. For specification of the dialogues of the interactive system, DIGIS supports interaction-by-example: dialogues are constructed by demonstrating interactions to the system. Dialogues constructed by example are mapped on a dedicated visual language, not only describing the behavior of objects but also the interactions between them. They can be edited through a direct manipulation graphical editor, which guarantees the syntactical correctness of the dialogues. DIGIS allows one to incrementally edit the user interface and run the application, providing instantaneous feedback of the interactive system under construction