Operationalizing the integration of user interaction specifications in the synthesis of modeling editors

Sousa, Vasco; Syriani, Eugene; Fall, Khady

doi:10.1145/3357766.3359539

Cited by 7 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…Finally, improving the interactivity or more generally the user experience of model-driven approaches and environments is a major concern [56], [57]. For example, [58] propose to complete generative DSL environment approaches with models dedicated to UIs and user interactions for improving the user experience.…”

Section: User Interactions As Objectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Interacto: A Modern User Interaction Processing Model

Blouin

Jézéquel

2022

IIEEE Trans. Software Eng.

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Since most software systems provide their users with interactive features, building user interfaces (UI) is one of the core software engineering tasks. It consists in designing, implementing and testing ever more sophisticated and versatile ways for users to interact with software systems, and safely connecting these interactions with commands querying or modifying their state. However, most UI frameworks still rely on a low level model, the bare bone UI event processing model. This model was suitable for the rather simple UIs of the early 80's (menus, buttons, keyboards, mouse clicks), but now exhibits major software engineering flaws for modern, highly interactive UIs. These flaws include lack of separation of concerns, weak modularity and thus low reusability of code for advanced interactions, as well as low testability. To mitigate these flaws, we propose Interacto as a high level user interaction processing model. By reifying the concept of user interaction, Interacto makes it easy to design, implement and test modular and reusable advanced user interactions, and to connect them to commands with built-in undo/redo support. To demonstrate its applicability and generality, we briefly present two open source implementations of Interacto for Java/JavaFX and TypeScript/Angular. We evaluate Interacto interest (1) on a real world case study, where it has been used since 2013, and with (2) a controlled experiment with 44 master students, comparing it with traditionnal UI frameworks.Index Terms-user interface, user interaction, UI event processing, separation of concerns, undo/redo ! INTRODUCTION"Anytime you turn on a computer, you're dealing with a user interface" [1]. User Interfaces (UIs), and the user interactions they supply, pervade our daily lives by enabling users to interact with software systems. The user interactions provided by a UI form a dialect between a system and its users [2]: a given user interaction can be viewed as a sentence composed of predefined words, i.e. low-level UI events, such as mouse pressure or mouse move. For example, we can view the execution of a drag-and-drop interaction as a sentence emitted by a user to the system. This sentence is usually composed of the words pressure, move, and release, that are UI events assembled in this specific order. The humancomputer interaction community designs novel and complex user interactions. As explained by [3], "Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) researchers have created a variety of novel [user] interaction techniques and shown their effectiveness in the lab [...]. Software developers need models, methods, and tools that allow them to transfer these techniques to commercial applications." Currently, to use such novel user interactions in software systems developers must complete two software engineering tasks: (i) They must assemble low-level UI events to build the expected user interaction. For example, a developer must manually assemble the events pressure, move, and release to build a drag-and-drop. (ii) They have to code how to process suc...

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Section: User Interactions As Objectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Interacto: A Modern User Interaction Processing Model

Blouin

Jézéquel

2022

IIEEE Trans. Software Eng.

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“…Finally, regarding user interaction, mechanisms for their customization are needed (e.g. see [92]). This could improve the flexibility and efficacy of modelling on mobile devices, which may be especially relevant given the large number of gestures supported by touch screens.…”

Section: User Interactionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Modelling on mobile devices

2021

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Modelling is central to many disciplines in engineering and the natural and social sciences. A wide variety of modelling languages and tools have been proposed along the years, traditionally for static environments such as desktops and laptops. However, the availability of increasingly powerful mobile devices makes it possible to profit from their embedded sensors and components (e.g. camera, microphone, GPS, accelerometer, gyroscope) for modelling. This has promoted a new range of modelling tools specially designed for their use in mobility. Such tools open the door to modelling in dynamic scenarios that go beyond the capabilities of traditional desktop tools. For example, modelling in mobility can be useful to design smart factories on-site, or to create models of hiking routes while walking along the routes, among many other scenarios. In this paper, we report on a systematic mapping study to identify the state of the art and trends in modelling on mobile devices. The study covers both research papers and modelling apps from the Android and iOS stores. From this analysis, we derive a classification for mobile modelling tools along three orthogonal dimensions, discuss current gaps, and propose avenues for further research.

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