A Model Based Approach for the Development of Consistent User Interfaces Ensuring an Enhanced User Experience

Abstract

User interfaces are the most important part of interactive software applications; being the entities which serve as a communication bridge between users and applications. Furthermore the user experience provided by any software application is the only factor to measure its success. Therefore an application can only be successful if besides having a worthy user interface, it also provides a pleasant user experience. Design of a good user interface suffers a lot recently with a rapid increase in the number of electronic devices as each device has its own constraints and capabilities that force the same application to run in multiple ways on multiple devices, thus generating the problem of inconsistent user interfaces. This situation also prohibits the provision of a good user experience as user interface is a very important aspect among many other aspects of user experience. In this paper; a framework is proposed that makes it possible to design multiple but consistent user interfaces of an application and also provides a wonderful experience to the end users. The proposed framework is validated by developing two different versions of a single interactive software application for two different devices. The development process is done by following the proposed framework. Final user interfaces of both versions are then compared to check consistency. This comparison shows that both user interfaces are consistent to each other and thus the proposed framework is validated.