Integrating widget design knowledge with user interface toolkits

It is shown how user interface design information can be presented to designers as part of a user interface toolkit, through an example of guidelines for widget use in the NeXT interface builder. This is part of larger framework for recording and reusing user interface design knowledge with scenario-oriented design rationales. The research reported combines generic guidelines with specific design rationales. Emphasis is placed on the design tradeoffs involved with choosing user interface widgets to implement required user operations. The representation used for design rationales, and its adaptation for more general guidelines is presented, together with an outline of how this representation was integrated with the NeXT interface builder