The Growth of a MOSAIC

MOSAIC is an object oriented UIMS and design environment for MS-DOS PCs. It has been in use for about five years, mostly in Scandinavia. In this paper we try to sum up the user feedback and draw some conclusions. We found that most PASCAL/C programmers initially had great problems seeing a design as a collection of interacting objects. It made them feel less “in control”. We consequently recommend to teach the programmers object oriented design before letting them implement large systems. The non-programmers often used the MOSAIC user interface editor to its limits, and in ways unintended by the tool designers. An easy-to-use, closed and consistent world of simple building blocks seems to give user interface designers the necessary security to be able to be creative and productive.