User Interface Patterns Research Articles

Review of User Interface-Facilitated Serendipity in Recommender Systems

Serendipity has become a desirable quality in designing recommender systems and user interfaces, hence offering a new measurement for system quality. At the same time, recognizing serendipitous experiences and determining their value is difficult due to their subjective nature. This review builds on 10 studies of user interfaces facilitating serendipity studies and attempts to understand the patterns that guide relevant user interface designs in recent recommender systems. This study furthers our understanding of turning the elusive experience of serendipity into more actionable user interface designs and patterns. The key findings are as follows. First, user controls and visualizations have facilitated serendipity, but studies of recommender systems have not gained considerable attention. Second, frameworks instrumental for user-interface-facilitated serendipity have not gained the researcher's worthy attention. Third, developing countries need to explore serendipity-facilitating recommender systems with more diverse users and more prominent test cases.

User Interface Pattern for AR in Industrial Applications

The background of the paper is that there are currently no specifications or guidelines for the design of a user interface for an augmented reality system in an industrial context. In this area, special requirements apply for the perception and recognition of content, which are given by the framework conditions of the industrial environment, the human–technology interaction, and the work task. This paper addresses the software-technical design of augmented reality surfaces in the industrial environment. The aim is to give first design examples for software tasks by means of sample solutions. For a user-oriented implementation, the methods of personas and an empirical investigation were used. Personas are a stereotypical representation of end users that reflect their characteristics and requirements. For the subsequent development of the pattern catalog, different prototypes with layout and interaction variants were tested in an empirical study with 50 participants. By observing the current realizations, these can be examined more closely in terms of their specific use in an industrial environment. The result is a pattern catalog with 26 solutions for layout and interaction variants. For the layout variants, no direct favorite of the testers could be ascertained; the existing solutions already offer a wide spectrum, which are chosen according to personal preferences. For interaction, on the other hand, it is important to enable fast input. During the study, gesture control revealed weaknesses in this regard. This can be supportive in the development of an industrial augmented reality system regarding a user-oriented representation of the interface.

Medical exoskeleton “Remotion” with an intelligent control system: Modeling, implementation, and testing

This article presents the intelligent control system of the lower limb medical exoskeleton “Remotion”, and describes the salient features of the system. Special attention is paid to simulation and modeling of the human gait and movement parameters, as well as testing the developed device, based on theoretical assumptions. The main parts of the system are presented in this paper, including drives control system, a bimodal user interface and walking pattern control system. The paper continues a series of works concerning the “Remotion” medical exoskeleton.

Category Theory-Based Mobile User Interface Pattern Recommendation Method

Although using the mobile user interface pattern (MUIP) can increase the efficiency and quality of mobile interface development, the existing pattern search methods have some limitations to provide appropriate patterns for solving a given design problem. In order to find the appropriate patterns, a category theory-based MUIP recommendation (CTR) method is proposed in this paper. First, the MUIP search is represented with a categorical structure so that the design problem can combine with the hierarchical structural MUIP repository closely. Then, to extract more accurate requirement information from the design problem, we present a question-based information extraction method that combines the general architecture for text engineering framework and category theory to extract the design goal, context, and level from the design problem. Finally, based on the categorical structure, we adopt a corresponding search strategy to find MUIPs according to the type of design problem. Some experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of CTR. The experimental results show that the CTR can provide a high performance in terms of accuracy and ranking when compared with the existing methods.

Pattern‐based GUI testing: Bridging the gap between design and quality assurance

SummarySoftware systems with a graphical user interface (GUI) front end are typically designed using user interface (UI) Patterns, which describe generic solutions (with multiple possible implementations) for recurrent GUI design problems. However, existing testing techniques do not take advantage of this fact to test GUIs more efficiently. In this paper, we present a new pattern‐based GUI testing (PBGT) approach that formalizes the notion of UI Test Patterns, which are generic test strategies to test UI patterns over their different implementations. The PBGT approach is evaluated via 2 case studies. The first study involves 2 fielded Web application subjects; findings show that PBGT is both practical and useful, as testing teams were able to find real bugs in a reasonable time interval. The second study allows deeper analysis by studying software subjects seeded with artificial faults; the findings show that PBGT is more effective than a manual model‐based test case generation approach.

User interface patterns in recommendation-empowered content intensive multimedia applications

Design Patterns (DPs) are acknowledged as powerful conceptual tools to improve design quality and to reduce time and cost of the development process by effect of the reuse of "good" design solutions. In many fields (e.g., software engineering, web engineering, interface design) patterns are widely used by practitioners and are also investigated from a research perspective. Still, they have been seldom explored in the arena of Recommender Systems (RSs). RSs provide suggestions ("recommendations") for items that are likely to be appropriate for the user profile, and are increasingly adopted in content-intensive multimedia applications to complement traditional forms of search in large information spaces. This paper explores RSs through the lens of User Interface (UI) Design Patterns. We have performed a systematic analysis of 54 recommendation-empowered content-intensive multimedia applications, in order to: (i) discover the occurrences of existing domain independent UI patterns; (ii) identify frequently adopted UI solutions that are not modelled by existing patterns, and define a set of new UI patterns, some of which are specific of the interfaces for recommendation features while others can be useful also in a broader context. The results of our inspection have been discussed with and evaluated by a team of experts, leading to a consolidated set of 14 new patterns that are reported in the paper. Reusing pattern-based design solutions instead of building new solutions from scratch enables novice and expert designers to build good UIs for Recommendation-empowered content intensive multimedia applications more effectively, and ultimately can improve the UX experience in this class of systems. From a broader perspective, our work can stimulate future research bridging Recommender Systems, Web Engineering and Interface Design by means of Design Patterns, and highlights new research directions also discussed in the paper.

Impact of Execution Modes on Finding Android Failures

The iMPAcT tool combines the benefits of existing user recurring behaviour (User Interface Patterns) on mobile applications to facilitate the test automation of Android mobile applications. It uses an automatic exploration process combined with reverse engineering to identify the existing user interface patterns on a mobile application and then tests those patterns with generic test strategies (designated Test Patterns). The Test Patterns are defined in a catalogue that can be reused for testing other applications. However the results obtained by the iMPAcT tool depend on the exploration mode and on the order in which the test strategies are applied. This paper describes an experiment conducted to evaluate the impact of using different exploration modes and of changing the order by which UI patterns are searched and subsequently tested on the failures found and on the number of events fired.

ISIG-Blocks: interactive creation blocks for tangible geometric games

This paper presents interactive creation blocks, called iSIG-Blocks (interactive SIG-Blocks), for automated tangible geometric games. iSIG-Blocks can detect physical motions and assembly configurations using embedded sensors. Each block features programmable LED display, a buzzer, and a vibration motor to provide sensory feedback to the player. A graphical user interface and tangible pattern design software (TAPware) were also developed for game administration, performance monitoring, and game customization. TAPware incorporates a computational measure of geometric complexity for generating game items of varying difficulty levels. For preliminary evaluation, a tangible memory game, Memorix, was developed and tested on a small group of young adults (N=12). The test results revealed that accuracy in correctness and in manipulation speed measurements was over 98%. Also, high correlation was found between the game performance and the complexity measure (r=0.84, p<0.01). Parameter sensitivity analysis revealed that the participants’ failure rate was more sensitive to color than to length or geometric shape, used in the game pattern.

Workflow User Interfaces Patterns

A collection of user interface design patterns for workflow information systems is presented that contains forty three resource patterns classified in seven categories. These categories and their corresponding patterns have been logically identified from the task life cycle based on offering and allocation operations. Each Workflow User Interface Pattern (WUIP) is characterized by properties expressed in the PLML markup language for expressing patterns and augmented by additional attributes and models attached to the pattern: the abstract user interface and the corresponding task model. These models are specified in a User Interface Description Language. All WUIPs are stored in a library and can be retrieved within a workflow editor that links each workflow pattern to its corresponding WUIP, thus giving rise to a user interface for each workflow pattern.

A methodology for designing information security feedback based on User Interface Patterns

A methodology is provided here to assist in the design of secure interactive applications. In particular, this methodology helps design an adequate security information feedback based on User Interface Patterns, the resulting feedback is then evaluated against a set of design/evaluation criteria called Human-Computer Interaction for Security (HCI-S). In case of a security issue the security information feedback is generally presented using the visual and auditory channels required to achieve an effective notifications, and it is explicitly specified in the design of user interfaces for secure web system.

Web Service-Security Specification based on Usability Criteria and Pattern Approach

A specification is provided in this paper to assist in the design of usable and secure web-services. In particular, this specification helps design an adequate security information feedback based on User Interface Patterns, the resulting visual feedback is then evaluated against a set of design/evaluation criteria called Human-Computer Interaction for Security (HCI-S). In addition we propose in a theoretical manner including the knowledge offered by the proposed specification based on patterns in a new level for the architectural structure of WS-Security specification, which is currently one of the most popular specifications to establish secure web services.