Integrating Metric Visualisation into a commercial user interface builder

Abstract

Interactive Metric Visualisation gives interface designers information about the usability of their designs, by overlaying usability information into their designs. To date, visualisations have been provided by special purpose prototype software. We describe how visualisations can be integrated into a commercial interface design tool, VisualWorks Smalltalk. This integration provides the benefits of metric visualisation to the users of the tool, illustrates the effort required to support visualisation in similar tools, and will support further experiments with metrics visualisation techniques.