Using Domain-Specific Modeling to Generate User Interfaces for Wizards

The rising adoption and incorporation of computers into everyday life requires human-computer interaction methods to be efficient and easy to understand. Simultaneously, complexities of underlying computer systems are increasing, inherently requiring deeper understanding and a detailed level of human-computer interaction methods. Software wizards are one important example from the category of tools that simplify this interaction. Through a simple, domain-specific, and targeted set of guided questions, wizards allow complex tasks to be completed quickly and simply. Tasks accomplished by wizards range from simple information collection to complex system configuration. Because wizards are task-specific, their lifespan is short and thus must live up to requirements to be easily and quickly adaptable. This paper outlines such wizard requirements and provides a metamodeling approach to wizard generation. A domain-specific modeling language is presented, which has been shown to be helpful in the generation of domain-specific wizards that are capable of change and adaptation to changing requirements