Survey on user interface programming

TLDR

The study surveys user interface programming practices. The survey was distributed widely and yielded 74 responses. The survey revealed that 48 % of code and 45–50 % of design/implementation time is devoted to user interfaces, 34 % of systems use toolkits, 27 % UIMS, 14 % interface builders, and 26 % no tools; toolkit-based systems had more sophisticated UIs, while UIMS and builders reduced UI effort, and developers cited requirements, help text, consistency, tool learning, performance, and communication as common problems.

Abstract

This paper reports on the results of a survey of user interface programming. The survey was widely distributed, and we received 74 responses. The results show that in today's applications, an average of 48% of the code is devoted to the user interface portion. The average time spent on the user interface portion is 45% during the design phase, 50% during the implementation phase, and 37% during the maintenance phase. 34% of the systems were implemented using a toolkit, 27% used a UIMS, 14% used an interface builder, and 26% used no tools. This appears to be because the toolkit systems had more sophisticated user interfaces. The projects using UIMSs or interface builders spent the least percent of time and code on the user interface (around 41%) suggesting that these tools are effective. In general, people were happy with the tools they used, especially the graphical interface builders. The most common problems people reported when developing a user interface included getting users' requirements, writing help text, achieving consistency, learning how to use the tools, getting acceptable performance, and communicating among various parts of the program.