Equivalence Relation Between Widgets for GUIs in Mobile Applications

Abstract

Everyday, more users choose to use mobile devices to provide their communication, information and recreation needs. There are several mobile platforms with their own characteristics: hardware, frameworks, APIs, sets of Widgets and interaction modalities, among others. Every platform has its own paradigm to implement applications. Software developers face a number of problems, including: To design native or multi-platform applications that comply with user centered design; to migrate applications between mobile platforms that maintain ease of use. Design patterns for mobile application development are presented as the obvious path to developing native applications, but there is no guarantee that usability will be retained between cross-platform applications or that they can be used on other platforms when applications are migrated. One solution to this problem is to establish an equivalence relation of Widgets between the mobile platforms. In this paper an equivalence relation of Widgets based on its functionality and its usability is proposed. The functionality is solved by means of a Widgets taxonomy and the usability with guides of visualization and tests with users. Based on their functionality, severals potentially equivalent widgets are proposed. Finally, tests with two sets of Widgets to validate that the equivalence relation is effective for the development of graphical user interfaces for mobile applications are presented.