MAUI: Mathematical Analysis of User Interfaces

Jeremy Gow in collaboration with Harold Thimbleby and Paul Cairns

MAUI is a prototype interface design tool written in Java, that aims to provides support for state-based user interface modelling and analysis. The system acts as a test bed for our analytical techniques and as a way of studying how they can be made available to the technical, but non-mathematical, interface designer.


Editing the interface model	Algebraic specification

Create finite state machine models of user interfaces.
Simulate the interface.
Specify and check the model's behaviour using a simple algebra.
Automatically detect inconsistent behaviours.
Read/write to XML (see the FUI DTD).
Create your own functionality via plugins.

Download MAUI

This is the relatively stable version of MAUI described in our CADUI and HCI papers, not the most recent (and less stable) version described in our DSVIS paper.

MAUI is written in Java 1.4 and so is platform-independant. Download it here:

MAUI 0.4.2 (tar.gz file)

and read the INSTALL file for instructions.

The system is currently very much under development, so please report any problems or difficulties to Jeremy Gow. At the moment it is poorly documented, but you can learn a bit about the system the papers below, especially the CADUI paper (ps.gz, pdf).

Related Publications

Jeremy Gow, Harold Thimbleby & Paul Cairns, Automatic Critiques of Interface Modes. In S. W. Gilroy & M. D. Harrison (eds), Interactive Systems: 12th International Workshop, DSVIS 2005, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, July 13-15, 2005, pp. 201-212. LNCS 3941, Springer. (ps,pdf)

Jeremy Gow, Harold Thimbleby & Paul Cairns, Misleading Behaviour in Interactive Systems. In A. Dearden & L. Watts (eds), Proc. 18th British HCI Group Annual Conference (HCI 2004), Volume 2. BCS, 2004. (pdf)

Jeremy Gow & Harold Thimbleby, MAUI: An Interface Design Tool Based On Matrix Algebra. In R. Jacob, Q. Limbourg & J. Vanderdonckt (eds), Proc. 4th International Conference on Computer-Aided Design of User Interfaces (CADUI 2004). Kluwer, 2004. (ps.gz, pdf)

Harold Thimbleby & Jeremy Gow, Computer Algebra in Interface Design Research. In Proc. 8th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI`04), p366--367. ACM Press, 2004. (ps.gz, pdf)

Paul Cairns, Matt Jones & Harold Thimbleby, Reusable Usability Analysis with Markov Models, ACM Transactions on Computer Human Interaction (TOCHI), 8(2):99-132, 2001.

Harold Thimbleby, Combining Systems and Manuals In J. L. Alty, D. Diaper & S. Guest (eds), People and Computers VIII, HCI'93, pp479-488, Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Last updated: 20th January 2008.