A Review of Milestones in the History of GUI Prototyping Tools

International audiencePrototyping is one of the core activities of User-Centered Design (UCD) processes and an integral component of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research. Nonetheless, for many years, prototyping was synonym of paper-based mock-ups and only more recently we can say that dedicated tools for supporting prototyping activities really reach the market. In this paper we propose to analyze the evolution of prototyping tools proposed by the academic community to support research activities and prototyping tools that are aimed and improve the development process of commercial user interfaces. Thus, this paper presents a review of past and current graphical user interface prototyping tools, in order to set up the state of the art in this field, observing fundamental milestones of features over time. For that, we have screened publications presented since 1988 in some of the main HCI conferences and 113 commercial tools available on the web. The results enable a brief comparison of characteristics present in both academic and commercial tools, how they have evolved and what are the gaps that can provide insights for future research and development

Composition dynamique d'Interfaces Homme-Machine : Besoin utilisateur ou Défi de chercheur ?

GrenobleNational audienceEn ingénierie traditionnelle de l'interaction homme-machine, le contexte d'usage () et la tâche de l'utilisateur () sont supposés connus à la conception. En informatique ambiante où le contexte d'usage devient variable, l'objectif de l'utilisateur peut émerger opportu-nément. Dès lors, il devient nécessaire de composer dy-namiquement des Interfaces Homme-Machine (IHM) aptes à répondre à l'objectif de l'utilisateur dans le con-texte d'usage courant. Cet article relate une étude terrain visant à cerner la pertinence du sujet du point de vue des utilisateurs. L'étude comporte une enquête qualitative menée auprès de 26 personnes et 3 groupes de discus-sion impliquant chacun une dizaine de sujets. Si l'étude mérite d'être élargie, elle apporte déjà des éclairages in-téressants pour orienter les développements

Cedar Studio: an IDE supporting adaptive model-driven user interfaces for enterprise applications

Support tools are necessary for the adoption of model-driven engineering of adaptive user interfaces (UI). Enterprise applications in particular, require a tool that could be used by developers as well as I.T. personnel during all the development and post-development phases. An IDE that supports adaptive model-driven enterprise UIs could further promote the adoption of this approach. This paper describes Cedar Studio, our IDE for building adaptive model-driven UIs based on the CEDAR reference architecture for adaptive UIs. This IDE provides visual design and code editing tools for UI models and adaptive behavior. It is evaluated conceptually using a set of criteria from the literature and applied practically by devising example adaptive enterprise user interfaces

Flexibility in MDE for scaling up from simple applications to real case studies: illustration on a Nuclear Power Plant

International audienceModel Driven Engineering provides powerful solutions for the development of User Interfaces. However, concepts and techniques are difficult to master and to apply: the threshold of use is said to be high, making designers and developers reluctant to use it. This paper investigates process model flexibility as a solution. We present three kinds of flexibility for improving design and development process models: (1) variability for equivalent choices, (2) granularability for several levels of details, (3) completeness for possibly optional and pre-defined reusable components. Flexibility decreases the threshold of use by reusability of knowledge, know-how and pieces of code. We illustrate these forms of flexibility on an industrial case study from the nuclear power plant domain. We explain how they are implemented in FlexiLab, a running prototype based on OSGi. The innovation is twofold: on one hand, the operationalization of flexibility; on the other hand, the jump from simple applications to real case studies thanks to flexibility

Adaptive model-driven user interface development systems

Adaptive user interfaces (UIs) were introduced to address some of the usability problems that plague many software applications. Model-driven engineering formed the basis for most of the systems targeting the development of such UIs. An overview of these systems is presented and a set of criteria is established to evaluate the strengths and shortcomings of the state-of-the-art, which is categorized under architectures, techniques, and tools. A summary of the evaluation is presented in tables that visually illustrate the fulfillment of each criterion by each system. The evaluation identified several gaps in the existing art and highlighted the areas of promising improvement

Engineering Adaptive Model-Driven User Interfaces

Software applications that are very large-scale, can encompass hundreds of complex user interfaces (UIs). Such applications are commonly sold as feature-bloated off-the-shelf products to be used by people with variable needs in the required features and layout preferences. Although many UI adaptation approaches were proposed, several gaps and limitations including: extensibility and integration in legacy systems, still need to be addressed in the state-of-the-art adaptive UI development systems. This paper presents Role-Based UI Simplification (RBUIS) as a mechanism for increasing usability through adaptive behaviour by providing end-users with a minimal feature-set and an optimal layout, based on the context-of- use. RBUIS uses an interpreted runtime model-driven approach based on the Cedar Architecture, and is supported by the integrated development environment (IDE), Cedar Studio. RBUIS was evaluated by integrating it into OFBiz, an open-source ERP system. The integration method was assessed and measured by establishing and applying technical metrics. Afterwards, a usability study was carried out to evaluate whether UIs simplified with RBUIS show an improvement over their initial counterparts. This study leveraged questionnaires, checking task completion times and output quality, and eye-tracking. The results showed that UIs simplified with RBUIS significantly improve end-user efficiency, effectiveness, and perceived usability

Modelom vođena softverska arhitektura za upravljanje metapodacima obrazovnih resursa

Purpose – The purpose of the research is to enable dynamic customization of metadata that describe educational resources in digital repositories.   Design/methodology/approach – Users need to describe educational resources in digital repositories according to the user-specific metadata set. Since users are mostly unskilled to customize the software application manually, our approach relies on the techniques of the model-driven software engineering, which should allow customization of the software application programmatically with no need to develop or order a new software application. In order to verify the proposed solution, we conducted an experiment which evaluated its characteristics.   Findings – A software platform for managing educational resources described by dynamically extendable metadata is proposed. The platform enables creating data models which are programmatically transformed to the web application for the management of educational resources. In this way a user can create their own model of metadata that is relevant in a particular domain. Research limitations / implications – The solution has been verified by users with technical knowledge. We should still explore the appropriateness of the platform for domain experts with little technical knowledge who would define new metadata in their domain. Practical implications – The solution can be used for digital repositories that store diverse educational resources. Each resource could be described using metadata that relates to the domain the resource belongs to. Originality/value – Digital repositories standardly describe educational resources using some general metadata, which are more focused on the physical characteristics of resources rather than their semantics. The proposed solution introduces custom domain-specific semantics into the resources’ description, which improves their retrieval.Cilj – Cilj disertacije je da se omogući dinamičko prilagođavanje metapodataka koji opisuju obrazovne resurse u digitalnim repozitorijumima. Metodologija - Postoji potreba da se u digitalnim repozitorijumima obrazovni resursi opišu putem skupa metapodataka koji je specifičan za određenog korisnika ili domen. Obzirom da korisnici ne mogu samostalno da ručno vrše izmenu softverske aplikacije, pristup predložen u ovoj disertaciji se zasniva na tehnikama modelom vođenog razvoja softvera, koji treba da omogući prilagođavanje softverske aplikacije programski, bez potrebe za razvojem ili naručivanjem nove aplikacije. Da bi se predloženo rešenje verifikovalo, sproveden je eksperiment koji evaluira njegove karakteristike. Rezultati - U disertaciji je predložena softverska platforma za upravljanje obrazovnim resursima opisanim dinamički proširivim skupom metapodataka. Platforma omogućuje kreiranje modela podataka koji se programski transformišu u veb aplikaciju za upravljanje obrazovnim resursima. Na ovaj način, korisnik može da kreira sopstveni model metapodataka koji je odgovarajući u određenom domenu. Ograničenja istraživanja/implikacije – Rešenje verifikovano od strane korisnicima sa određenim tehničkim znanjem. Potrebno je istražiti prikladnost platforme za domenske eksperte sa ograničenim tehničkim znanjem, koji treba da definišu nove skupove metapodataka u svom domenu. Praktične implikacije – Rešenje se može koristiti u digitalnim repozitorijuma koji skladište raznolike obrazovne resurse. Svaki resurs može biti opisan koristeći metapodatke iz domena kojem resurs pripada. Originalnost/vrednost - Digitalni repozitorijumi standardno opisuju obrazovne resurse koristeći neki generalni skup metapodataka, koji je više fokusiran na fizičke karakteristike resursa, umesto na njihovo značenje. Predloženo rešenje uvodi proizvoljnu domenski-zavisnu semantiku u opis resursa, čime se unapređuje njihovo dobavljanje

A Sketching Tool for Designing Anyuser, Anyplatform, Anywhere User Interfaces

Abstract. Sketching activities are widely adopted during early design phases of user interface development to convey informal specifications of the interface presentation and dialog. Designers or even end users can sketch some or all of the future interface they want. With the ever increasing availability of different computing platforms, a need arises to continuously support sketching across these platforms with their various programming languages, interface development environments and operating systems. To address needs along these dimensions, which pose new challenges to user interface sketching tools, SketchiXML is a multi-platform multi-agent interactive application that enable designers and end users to sketch user interfaces with different levels of details and support for different contexts of use. The results of the sketching are then analyzed to produce interface specifications independently of any context, including user and platform. These specifications are exploited to progressively produce one or several interfaces, for one or many users, platforms, and environments.