What is a Configurable User Interface?
The Enquire project involved creating a configurable user interface
for the Okapi retrieval system.
The phrase configurable interface could refer to:
- an interface which end-users can alter to suit their needs, e.g. by
resizing the font, changing the background colour, zooming into regions
of the terminal screen;
- an interface which a developer can build from display objects such
as controls and widgets, using an interpretable configuration language;
- an interface which allows variable parameters to be set for different
evaluative conditions.
To some extent all these were relevant to the Enquire project, but most
important was the third: that the experimenter should be able to vary the
parameters to test different retrieval algorithms and different modes of
interaction between user and system.