Abstract
Software systems start to include other types of interfaces beyond the “traditional” Graphical-User Interfaces (GUIs). In particular, Conversational User Interfaces (CUIs) such as chat and voice are becoming more and more popular. These new types of interfaces embed smart natural language processing components to understand user requests and respond to them. To provide an integrated user experience all the user interfaces in the system should be aware of each other and be able to collaborate. This is what is known as a multiexperience User Interface. Despite their many benefits, multiexperience UIs are challenging to build. So far CUIs are created as standalone components using a platform-dependent set of libraries and technologies. This raises significant integration, evolution and maintenance issues. This paper explores the application of model-driven techniques to the development of software applications embedding a multiexperience User Interface. We will discuss how raising the abstraction level at which these interfaces are defined enables a faster development and a better deployment and integration of each interface with the rest of the software system and the other interfaces with whom it may need to collaborate. In particular, we propose a new Domain Specific Language (DSL) for specifying several types of CUIs and show how this DSL can be part of an integrated modeling environment able to describe the interactions between the modeled CUIs and the other models of the system (including the models of the GUI). We will use the standard Interaction Flow Modeling Language (IFML) as an example “host” language.
Highlights
The specification and the implementation of the User Interface (UI) of a system is a key aspect in any softwareCommunicated by Iris Reinhartz-Berger.Spain development project
1 Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, 08018 Barcelona, Spain 2 Politecnico di Milano, 20133 Milano, Italy 3 ICREA - Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, 08010 Barcelona, Spain development project. This UI takes the form of a Graphical User Interface (GUIs) that encompasses a number of visual components 1 [19] to offer rich interactions between the user and the system
The rest of the paper is structured as follows: Section 2 provides the background and introduces some preliminary concepts used through the paper; Section 3, which is focused on Conversational User Interfaces (CUIs), presents a new Domain Specific Language (DSL) for specifying these interfaces; Section 4 shows an extension of the standard Interaction Flow Modeling Language (IFML) to describe the links between the multiexperience UIs and the other software components; Section 5 reviews the related work; Section 6 outlines several lines for the further work; and Sect. 7 draws the conclusions
Summary
The specification and the implementation of the User Interface (UI) of a system is a key aspect in any software. Most non-trivial systems adhere to some kind of model-based philosophy [8] where software design models (including GUI models) are transformed into the production code the system executes at run-time This transformation can be (semi)automated in some cases. The rest of the paper is structured as follows: Section 2 provides the background and introduces some preliminary concepts used through the paper; Section 3, which is focused on Conversational User Interfaces (CUIs), presents a new Domain Specific Language (DSL) for specifying these interfaces; Section 4 shows an extension of the standard Interaction Flow Modeling Language (IFML) to describe the links between the multiexperience UIs and the other software components; Section 5 reviews the related work; Section 6 outlines several lines for the further work; and Sect. The rest of the paper is structured as follows: Section 2 provides the background and introduces some preliminary concepts used through the paper; Section 3, which is focused on Conversational User Interfaces (CUIs), presents a new Domain Specific Language (DSL) for specifying these interfaces; Section 4 shows an extension of the standard Interaction Flow Modeling Language (IFML) to describe the links between the multiexperience UIs and the other software components; Section 5 reviews the related work; Section 6 outlines several lines for the further work; and Sect. 7 draws the conclusions
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