I received a thesis paper and other material from Robert Fenchel describing SARA, the System ARchitect's Assistant. It is a tool for building consistent user interface, with prompting similar to the TOPS-20 cmnd jsys, but going way beyond that. Semantic help is also available, as well as a way to create documentation from it. This is not online in the summary. It is included in the summary file.
Interface design seems to be a field unto itself.
There are journals devoted to the subject that go into tremendous detail about the most extraordinary things. If you want detailed info on a particular aspect there is a wealth of stuff waiting at your CS oriented library. Here's hoping we can all utilize the power of personal workstations, mice and beautiful graphic displays in our future interface design efforts. I had such a beast when I was a teacher. Topics of interest might include EFT security, technical details of existing and future systems, rate structures, policies, and regulatory climates.