Desain, P., & Brus, T. (1993). What ever happened to our beautiful schematics. In Proceedings of the 1993 International Computer Music Conference. 366-368. San Francisco: International Computer Music Association.
Abstract
In 1986 the use of graphical programming was proposed and analysed by Desain for data flow languages in the computer music domain. Although progress in this area has been slow, anno 1993 most of the computer music community is familiar with commercial applications that are based on that approach, most notably the MAX real time interactive composition language and the patch bay of the Macintosh Midi-Manager. Plumbing, fitting together computational modules and processes, is a great metaphor for many applications in the computer music programming domain, especially when it is implemented in a graphical - direct manipulation way. But the choices both in the graphical appearance and in the user interface interaction style greatly influence the ease and pleasure of use of these systems. Although a complete formal approach to the analysis of user interface design is not feasible, enough is already known to define good general user interface principles and guidelines. To mention a couple: the need for visual continuity, the prevention of information overload, the minimisation of semantic and syntactic distances between domain and user interface appearance and behaviour, the automatic enforcement of syntactic correctness, and the minimisation of the number of 'modes'. The use of state-of-the-art user interface design and present day computation and presentation technology can provide systems that are intuitive and easy to use. They are based on the much older tradition of good graphical layout of schematics and diagrams and support these directly. This will be illustrated with examples of the design decisions taken in the DOMINO graph editor which was build for a large signal processing project.