Usability heuristics for domain-specific languages (DSLs)

Abstract

The usability of Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) has been attracting considerable interest from researchers lately. In particular, our literature review found many usability studies that make use of subjective and empirical methods. However, we noted a lack of heuristic methods in the literature. In comparison, there exist several usability studies of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that have used heuristics with success, so we argue that this approach would be also useful for DSLs. Therefore, this paper proposes a set of usability heuristics for DSLs and illustrates the approach with a case study. We show how our heuristics helped us identify many actual usability problems, even for a simple DSL. CCS CONCEPTS• Human-centered computing → HCI theory, concepts and models; • Software and its engineering → Designing software.

Design Guidelines for Improving User Experience in Industrial Domain-Specific Modelling Languages

“…Usability heuristics, should therefore, complement the earlier proposed design decisions. Since most graphical modelling tools have an underlying Application Programming Interface (API) to support in the development of DSMLs, we consider the following usability taxonomy attributes, proposed and compared to UX studies in APIs [39], important in graphical modelling:…”

“…While human-centred design approaches for usability evaluation [43] have been reviewed, we consider the principles of human-centred design defined in ISO 9241-210 [31] to be generally applicable. In our work, we consider only certain DSL usability heuristics proposed by [39] important in the context of industrial DSMLs. Further, challenges and future direction for UX in model-driven engineering approaches is discussed in [1], whereas our work focusses on improving the general usability and UX in industrial graphical DSMLs.…”

Towards a Systematic Engineering of Industrial Domain-Specific Languages

“…A nucleus nuance is a characteristic of a model element describing the model element's intent, motivation and consequences based on reasoning to enhance UX for DSL Users. The usability aspects in building graphical DSLs is often neglected which leads to users struggling in understanding complex DSLs [33], [34]. Therefore, nuances are described by the DSL Building Block Developer for effective usability and visual notation conventions [35], [36], [7] in making better design decisions with respect to each individual domain.…”