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?10of 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?70 during the implementation phase, and 37% during the maintenance phase. 345Z0of the systems were implemented using a toolkit, 27'-%oused a UIMS, 1470 used an interface builder, and 26% used no tools. The projects using only toolkits spent the largest percentage of the time and code on the user interface (around 60%) compared to around 45% for those with 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 graphicai 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.
In 1992 it was found that the user interface composed 50% to 80% of the code of an application REF .
Survey on user interface programming
CHI '92
Computer Science