A model-based interface development environment

Abstract

Mobi-D is a highlyost interface development problems can be traced to two sources: the need for usercentered design environments and the lack of software systems that support all major development stages. Developer-centered environments, which are typical of most systems, give ample support to using and managing widgets, organizing and arranging layouts, and testing prototype interfaces, but fall short of answering key questions such as how widgets in a given dialog box can be used to accomplish a particular user task. The designer is forced to rely on her own experience to answer such questions or to distill a solution from loosely connected documentation.In this article, I describe Mobi-D 1,2 (Model-Based Interface Designer), a comprehensive environment that supports usercentered design through model-based interface development. In the Mobi-D paradigm, a series of declarative models, such as user-task, dialog, and presentation, are interrelated to provide a formal representation of an interface design. This contrasts to model-based systems, which use only one or two models in isolation and have no explicit notion as to how the various model elements are organized into an interface design. M.

Managing Complexity in Activity Specifications by Separation of Concerns and Reusability

“…Task models have been used for several years to develop interactive systems [4]. We presented ideas to use task models for workflow systems [6] and we used task models for providing assistance in smart environments [21].…”

“…They have been proven to be useful as specification languages of functional requirements in Human Computer Interaction (HCI) (e.g., [1], [2], [3], and [4]). Additionally, they were used to support smart environments [5] and workflow management systems [6].…”

Metamodels Infrastructure and Heuristics for Metamodel-Driven Multi-touch Interaction

“…Model-based User Interface Development Environments (Mb-UIDE) [27] provide a mechanism to design the UI by means of a number of declarative models, which are latter translated into code directly executable on a specific platform or into an intermediate language (usually XML-based). Mb-UIDE has been in use since the beginning of the 90s and it is becoming increasingly integrated into the MDD approach [34].…”

The Beautification Process in Model-Driven Engineering of User Interfaces

“…The consequence of this manual beautification is that all efforts are not saved and are lost if a new UI is regenerated [18]: if the UI model changes, the generated UI changes accordingly but it is no longer compliant with the manual changes done previously. To alleviate this problem, researchers in MDE introduced various solutions to the so-called round-trip engineering [2]: manual modifications could be saved, interpreted, abstracted and finally replaced by a 'beautified' operation to be propagated to the model that initiated the M2M and M2C transformations.…”