Loren Terveen, Elena Papavero, Mark Tuomenoksa
AT&T Bell Laboratories
terveen, elenap, mlt@research.att.com
DynaDesigner is a tool for creating, testing, and deploying
interactive services to be delivered on devices such as telephones,
TVs, and PCs.
A key feature is that it supports device-independent service
design -- a service is designed once, independent of any particular
device.
This eases the design and maintenance task for service providers
and makes services easier for consumers to use, since they are
consistent across devices.
DynaDesigner has been used to design and deploy many services.
With DynaDesigner, services can be designed and deployed in hours.
service creation tools, device-independent
design, end user programming, consumer systems
The convergence of computers, communications, and consumer electronics
brings a new urgency to the problem of creating easy to use systems --
now all people with telephones and TVs, not just PC owners, are
potential users.
Further, the proliferation of devices raises the challenge of creating
device-independent services --
consumers may want to use a single service such as home banking on
different devices, such as telephones, TVs, PCs, or PDAs, and they
will want consistency across devices.
We have responded to these challenges by creating a service authoring
tool called DynaDesigner.
Direct manipulation, form-based editing, and graphical simulation are
used to design and test services.
Code is generated that implements the service logic on standard
hosting platforms.
Device-specific interpreters enable the same service to be delivered
on many devices and guarantee a consistent, high quality interface for
each device.
DynaDesigner targets the class of transactional services that includes
activities such as home banking, bill paying, ticket purchasing, and
catalog shopping.
In such services, a consumer completes a transaction by reading or
listening to information, selecting options from menus, and supplying
information such as personal identification numbers.
Such services typically are implemented in a distributed,
network-based architecture. The program that implements the service
runs on a hosting platform -- a computer on the service
provider's premises or in the telephone network equipped with special
purpose voice and data transmission hardware.
The service provider's databases typically are on a large mainframe
computer.
And the service is delivered on a consumer device, such as a
telephone, TV, or PC.
The hosting platform, database machines, and delivery devices are
connected by a combination of telephone lines and high speed data
links.
DynaDesigner is a service creation tool that addresses the following
goals:
DynaDesigner achieves these goals with two major
features:
Our service creation building blocks include computational (or
logic) objects, such as objects for accessing databases,
branching based on data comparisons or on the time, date, or day of
week, and transferring calls to customer service representatives.
Clearly, the logic of a service is device-independent -- the challenge
is coming up with a device-independent way of specifying user
interactions.
We do this by providing a set of generic
interaction (or dialogue) objects that encapsulate
common types of interactions --
such as Present Information, Get Input, and Present
Options -- but do not specify the surface details of
how the interaction should be carried out.
Each type of object has one or more editors
for filling in the information required for that object.
A designer specifies the logic of a service by selecting objects from
a palette, positioning them on a design pad, then linking the objects.
For example, a
home banking application might begin with a
Present Information object that welcomes the user,
continue with a Get Input object that asks the user to
enter a personal identification number (PIN) and verifies the PIN is
valid, and next contain a Present Options object that offers
the user a set of home-banking services.
While we keep the core of the service specification
device-independent, we also provide principled ways to specify
and use device-specific information.
First, a device-specific interface template for each interaction
object is used to generate the speech or display and manage
user input.
For example, suppose a Present Options object contains three
options, say ``Account Balance'', ``Transfer of Funds'', and ``Order
New Checks''.
The template for spoken menus and text-to-speech synthesis would
generate the spoken instructions ``For Account Balance, press 1'',
``For Transfer...''.
Users could select an option by pressing the appropriate key on the
touchtone pad.
The template for TV display screens might result in
each item being presented on a separate, numbered
line.
Users could select an option by pressing the
appropriate button on a universal remote control.
Second, device-specific editors collect information that
enhances the presentation of a service on a particular device. For
example, a phrase manager for spoken output allows
text to be broken up into phrases, each of which can
be spoken using a professionally recorded voice, and
an appearance editor for screen output allows designers to specify
bitmaps to use as screen backgrounds and tailor display properties
such as font, background color, etc.
At any time, a service designer may simulate a
service, to determine whether the logic is correct and
get a feel for what the interaction would be like
on a specific device.
When the service is complete, DynaDesigner automatically generates the
code to implement it on a standard service hosting platform.
Currently, code is generated for the Conversant, a special
purpose AT\&T computer that resides in the AT\&T
network or on the premises of a service provider. It
can send and receive voice or data over telephone
lines and can communicate with other computers as
necessary, for example, to access a database.
We have developed DynaDesigner in close collaboration with service
providers, building many services
to ensure ease of use and broad coverage.
DynaDesigner went into production use in August
1994. More than 20 voice services have been deployed.
Using DynaDesigner dramatically decreased the time it took to design
and deploy a service.
The application of DynaDesigner to interactive TV services is newer,
and it was this that led us to develop the device-independent
interaction objects. To date, we have
designed several services based on these new objects
and will be implementing and deploying these and
other such services in the near future.
DynaDesigner is related to cross-platform GUI construction tools and
end user programming environments.
Like a GUI builder, it enables the design of an interactive system that
can run on different devices.
However, with DynaDesigner, designers specify dialogue structure and
content, not widgets and layout.
And rather than delivery across different windowing systems and
interface toolkits, DynaDesigner services are generic across a
range of devices, from televisions to telephones.
As an end user programming system, DynaDesigner enables users who
are not programmers to create applications.
Unlike general purpose visual programming
[1]
or state machine
[3]
systems, DynaDesigner is a domain-specific system.
It provides a set of high-level, domain-specific
abstractions for building applications.
Other systems exist for creating voice dialogues, both commercial
tools such as Visual Voice and TFLX, and research prototypes such as
the Voice Dialog Design Environment
[2].
Our work is distinguished by our provision of high-level,
device-independent building blocks.
Further, we automatically generate the code to implement services as
network-based, distributed applications, which typically means that
many more customers can be served.
We conclude by summarizing the lessons this work has taught us.
First, by providing high-level abstractions for creating services, we
both ease the task of service authoring and enable device-independent
services.
Service authoring is neither a programming task nor an interface
design task, which leaves service authors free to concentrate on
the service content.
(We are continuing to develop our building blocks in response to user
feedback; for example, we have created objects for dealing with
databases that are simpler to use, encapsulate both data access and user
interaction, and are more cleanly device-independent.)
Second, end-to-end service authoring requires addressing
infrastructure issues; thus, we generate code to implement services
on standard hosting platforms, to handle distribution of computation
in network-based services, and to interface to legacy databases.
The combination of high-level building blocks and end-to-end service
generation makes DynaDesigner a very usable and useful tool.
Keywords:
HELP SERVICE USERS BY HELPING SERVICE CREATORS
TRANSACTIONAL SERVICES
DynaDesigner
RELATED WORK
CONCLUSIONS
References