EECS Publication
Lessons Learned from Users' Experiences with Spreadsheet Constraints in the Garnet and Amulet Graphical Toolkits
Bradley T. Vander Zanden, Richard Halterman, Brad A. Myers, Rob Miller, Pedro Szekely, Dario A. Giuse, David Kosbie, and Rich McDaniel
Spreadsheet-like constraints have been incorporated in many graphical user interface toolkits because they are simple to learn, easy to write, and can express many types of useful graphical relationships. The existing papers on spreadsheet constraints have focused on their design and implementation. In contrast, this paper is an evaluative paper that examines users' experience with two of these toolkits, Garnet and Amulet, over a 10 year time span. The lessons gained from this examination can help guide the design of future constraint systems. The most important lessons are that: 1. constraints should be allowed to contain arbitrary code that is a) written in the underlying toolkit language, and b) does not require any annotations, such as parameter declarations, 2. constraints are difficult to debug and better debugging tools are needed, and 3. programmers will readily use constraints to specify the graphical layout of an application but must be carefully and time consumingly trained to use them for other purposes.
Published 2002-10-01 04:00:00 as ut-cs-02-488 (ID:234)