Usability requirements for interaction-oriented development tools

Abstract : Building interactive software is a notoriously complex task, for which many programming tools have been proposed over the years. Although the research community has sporadically identified usability requirements for such tools, tool proponents rarely document their design processes and there is no established reference for comparing tools with requirements. Furthermore, the design of most tools is strongly influenced by the design of their underlying general purpose programming languages. These in turn were designed from their own set of little-documented requirements, which adds to the confusion. In this paper, we provide a review and classification of the requirements and properties expected of interactive development tools. We review how designers of APIs and toolkits for interaction-oriented systems set the usability requirements for the programming interface of their systems. We relate our analysis to other studies in related domains such as end-user programming, natural programming, and teaching.