Models and methods of designing human-machine interaction-oriented interfaces

Abstract

Formalization approaches of user interface design (UID) in conjunction with model driven techniques aim to improve the usability in terms of conformity to standards or style guides and to leverage code generation of interactive software systems, so that various UI platforms for web, desktop or mobile Applications are supported. Because large parts of the UI are described platform independent instead of platform dependent implementations, re-usability of the UI concept is also improved. However, UI formalization requires the usage of a formal UI description language and a higher level of abstractness compared to concrete UI code. These languages need to be learned by the UI designer. In practice, most parts of a user interface are still manually designed and coded individually for every platform. This paper describes how HCI (Human Computer Interface) patterns that are described formally can be used in conjunction with model-based user interface design in order to make it easier for the designer to use formalization techniques for the development of user interfaces. The approach uses two UML profiles: The MBUID (Model-Based User Interface Design) profile and the HCI pattern profile. With these profiles formal models of interactive systems can be created on a platform independent level. The user interface is then automatically generated by model-driven development tool chain.