Declarative interface models for user interface construction tools: the MASTERMIND approach

Currently, building a user interface involves creating a large procedural program. Modelbased programming provides an alternative new paradigm. In the model-based paradigm, developers create a declarative model that describes the tasks that users are expected to accomplish with a system, the functional capabilities of a system, the style and requirements of the interface, the characteristics and preferences of the users, and the I/O techniques supported by the delivery platform. Based on the model, a much smaller procedural program then determines the behavior of the system. There are several advantages to this approach. The declarative model is a common representation that tools can reason about, enabling the construction of tools that automate various aspects of interface design, that assist system builders in the creation of the model, that automatically provide context sensitive help and other run-time assistance to users. The common model also allows the tools that operate on it t..

Bridging Enterprise and Software Engineering Through an User-Centered Design Perspective

International audienceThe development of Web-based Information Systems is crucial in the quest to maintain and develop the enterprise competiveness. However, capturing requirements from Business Processes (BP) is still an issue, as existing methods mostly focus, or on human aspects and the user interface, or on business concerns as rules and workflow coordination, and therefore do not specify all the Software Architectural components which are relevant for software development. We present the Goals Approach, which analyzes BPs and User Tasks and details them in the process of methodically designing and structuring the User Interface, the Business Logic and the Database of the Information System given a Model-View-Controller (MVC) architectural pattern. In this paper we focus on how to obtain the Goals business model of requirements based on the DEMO method. The approach can be used for in-house software development, and the method is straightforward fitting Small and Medium Enterprises agility needs

An Application-Independent Intelligent User Support System Exploiting Action-Sequence Based User Modelling

Many software systems' usability suffers from their complexity, usually caused by the market-driven trend to bundle a huge amount of features, which are supposed to increase the product's attractiveness. This attempt, however, more often than not leads to software with poor usability characteristics, therefore requiring an extensive amount of initial effort for the users to become familiar with the system. One way to overcome this problem is by providing user-adapted usage support. In thi