Glossary » Acronyms

RSVP

a mnemonic for requirements analysis – structural design – visual design – production, the main steps in a design process. In the spirit of iterative design, each stage would have an evaluation component to ensure that the design was proceeding…

SAFE

simplicity, appropriate form, function (workability & beauty), economy of effort. SAFE design principles were the organizing principle of the modern design book “art: an approach”, by Robert C. Niece, 1959.

sccs

source code control system or version control system (vcs) or revision control system (rcs); a software application designed to help coordinate document modifications and updates among a group of people (especially coordinating updates to software source code). Source code control…

SIGCHI

special interest group on computer-human interaction. A professional organization that operates as part of the ACM (association of computing machinery) that brings together academics, students, and practitioners to study HCI (human-computer interaction). SIGCHI sponsors the annual CHI conference.

single-display groupware

SDG; a system where 2 or more people can simultaneously interact with a computer displaying on a single monitor. This is quite common for arcade games, but may be practical for certain educational applications and monitoring applications. The key problem…

small user interface design

SUI; design for extremely small output devices such as cell phone displays, watches, car radio displays, and other small information appliances.

touch interactive display

TID; an input device that overlays a screen, or touchscreen, that recognizes where the user touches as input.

TTY

teletype; an ancient terminal that displayed all input and output by printing it on a line printer.

UCD

user-centered design: design around the needs and goals of users and with users involved in the design process, design with usability as a primary focus.

UIMS

user interface management system. A development environment for designing and building user interfaces.

Typical features include a graphics system, a widget library, layout editor, and various programming language and operating system extensions to support larger-scale development, such as object-oriented features…

UISE

user interface software engineering (pronounced “WISE”). The field that studies how good user interfaces can be effectively built, often focusing on user interface toolkits and support for graphics, layout, and widgets, but also considering support for peripherals, other modalities of…

UIST

user interface software and technology (pronounced “WIST”); the name of an annual conference sponsored by ACM SIGCHI that takes a computer science and software development point of view on how to build user interface software.

UPA

Usability Professional’s Association, a professional organization for practitioners in the field of usability and human-computer interaction.

user acceptance testing

UAT; a method for determining how well users have adopted a new technology, especially in organizational settings. Users are typically interviewed to determine if and how they are using the technology and to understand what barriers to adoption may exist.…

user interface

UI; the parts of a computer system that a person uses to communicate with the computer. This includes the way the computer conveys messages to the person (output devices), the way the person talks to the computer (input devices), and…

VDU

visual display unit; a screen or monitor. Also, VDT, visual display terminal.

visual interaction design

(VID) design of interactive systems with an emphasis on the visual or graphic elements. Strongly influenced by the graphic design perspective, visual interaction design integrates concerns with how users provide feedback to visual systems and how the flow and interaction…

voice output communication aid

VOCA; a device used by those with speech impairments that uses computer-generated speech to communicate.

VR

virtual reality; the modeling of 3-dimensional worlds that can be moved in and explored; a 3D interface whose metaphor is an actual world that people inhabit instead of just looking into it, used, for instance, for games and interpersonal communication.…

VRML

Virtual Reality Markup Language; a simple notation for describing 3-dimensional spaces and links between different sites, allowing 3-D spaces to be browsed like websites and other hypertext.

WIMP interface

windows-icons-menus-pointer. A style of graphical user interface that uses these common widgets. A paradigm for human-computer interaction.

WWW

world-wide web; the collection of interlinked multimedia documents on the internet organized to enable easy navigation from one document to another, usually presented in HTML format.

WYSIWIS

(WHI-ZEE-WIZ) what you see is what I see. A term used for groupware interfaces that guarantee that users see the same thing at all times. This design principle says that it is easiest for users to coordinate when they are…

WYSIWITYS

(WHI-ZEE-WHI-TEEZ) what you see is what I think you see. This design principle is a relaxation of WYSIWIS that indicates that it is useful to have customized interfaces for each user, but that it is still important for each user…

WYSIWYG

(WHI-ZEE-WIG) what you see is what you get. A term used for direct-manipulation user interfaces.

The idea is that any operation that you visually perform is what is actually happening to the underlying data structure, and whatever you edit on…