A case study in automated GUI generation for multiple devices

Abstract

Model-driven generation of Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) is desirable, since it potentially allows to save time and effort in comparison to manual development. Current state-of-the-art GUI generation approaches support fully automatic GUI generation for different devices, but the usability of the resulting GUIs is typically rather low. This work presents the development and heuristic evaluation of two automatically generated GUIs for a small bike rental application, one for a desktop PC and one for a smartphone, in form of a case study. To improve the usability of such automatically generated GUIs, we considered a set of usability heuristics already during the model-driven development of the application. The results of the subsequently performed heuristic evaluation show that the consideration of usability heuristics in the first iteration of a model-driven development process allows to ensure a basic level of usability. However, they also underline that manual customization is inevitable for achieving high quality GUIs.