Adrien Coyette

A sketching tool for designing anyuser, anyplatform, anywhere user interfaces

Sketching activities are widely adopted during early design phases of user interface development to convey informal specifications of the interface presentation and dialog. Designers or even end users can sketch some or all of the future interface they want. With the ever increasing availability of different computing platforms, a need arises to continuously support sketching across these platforms with their various programming languages, interface development environments and operating systems. To address needs along these dimensions, which pose new challenges to user interface sketching tools, Sketchi XML is a multi-platform multi-agent interactive application that enable designers and end users to sketch user interfaces with different levels of details and support for different contexts of use. The results of the sketching are then analyzed to produce interface specifications independently of any context, including user and platform. These specifications are exploited to progressively produce one or several interfaces, for one or many users, platforms, and environments.

Multi-fidelity prototyping of user interfaces

Multi-fidelity prototyping combines within a single user interface prototype several elements whose representations are reproduced with different levels of fidelity with respect to the final user interface: no fidelity at all, low fidelity, medium fidelity, and high fidelity. In order to effectively and efficiently support multi-fidelity, an original set of techniques is defined and discussed: multiple representation manipulation by sketching and gesture recognition, smooth transition between any representation at any time, prototype reusability, multi-platform support, and multiple user interface prototyping facilities. The full implementation of these techniques in prototyping software provides designers and developers with a unique environment for exploring multiple designs with unprecedented support for quickly designing interfaces from scratch or from previously existing design templates. An experimental study reveals that the multiple representation manipulation together with smooth transition represents a valuable advantage for naturally designing user interfaces. The prototyping software supports several aspects involved in the user interface development life cycle and is convenient for non-WIMP user interfaces.

SketchiXML: towards a multi-agent design tool for sketching user interfaces based on USIXML

During these last years, many researchers have proposed new alternatives for early interface design based on hand-sketch. But these new alternatives seem to be dedicated to obsolescence as they only offer the possibility to generate user interfaces for a single platform in a unique language. Indeed, in a context where the number of computing-platforms and system environments is exploding, new alternatives should be considered. This paper presents an innovating alternative with SketchiXML, a multi-agent application able to handle several kinds of hand-drawn sources as input, and to provide the corresponding specification in USIXML (USer Interface eXtensible Markup Language), a platform-independent user interface description language.

Trainable sketch recognizer for graphical user interface design

In this paper we present a new algorithm for automatic recognition of hand drawn sketches based on the Levenshtein distance. The purpose for drawing sketches in our application is to create graphical user interfaces in a similar manner as the well established paper sketching. The new algorithm is trainable by every user and improves the recognition performance of the techniques which were used before for widget recognition. In addition, this algorithm ay serve for recognizing other types of sketches, such as letters, figures, and commands. In this way, there is no modality disruption at sketching time.

User interface design by sketching: a complexity analysis of widget representations

User interface design by sketching, as well as other sketching activities, typically involves sketching objects through representations that should combine meaningfulness for the end users and easiness for the recognition engines. To investigate this relationship, a multi-platform user interface design tool has been developed that enables designers to sketch design ideas in multiple levels of fidelity with multi-stroke gestures supporting widget representations and commands. A usability analysis of these activities, as they are submitted to a recognition engine, suggests that the level of fidelity, the amount of constraints imposed on the representations, and the visual difference of representations positively impact the sketching activity as a whole. Implications for further sketch representations in user interface design and beyond are provided based on usability guidelines.

Human-Centered Engineering of Interactive Systems with the User Interface Markup Language

The User Interface Markup Language (UIML) is a User Interface Description Language aimed at producing multiple user interfaces from a single model for multiple contexts of use, in particular multiple computing platforms, thus addressing the need for multichannel user interfaces. This chapter summarizes efforts devoted to the definition and usage of UIML 4.0, the latest version of this UIDL which also covers dialog modeling. It describes the main parts of the UIML language, i.e., structure, presentation style, contents, behavior, connectivity, and toolkit mappings, and the integrated development environment that supports the development lifecycle of multichannel user interfaces based on UIML.

A Multi Agent Perspective on Data Integration Architectural Design

Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) architectures are gaining popularity for building open, distributed, and evolving software required by systems such as data integration applications. Unfortunately, despite considerable work in software architecture during the last decade, few research efforts have aimed at truly defining patterns and languages for designing such multi-agent architectures. We propose a modern approach based on organizational structures and architectural description languages to define and specify multi-agent architectures notably in the case of data integration system design as illustrated in this paper.

SketchiXML: a design tool for informal user interface rapid prototyping

Sketching consists of a widely practiced activity during early design phases of product in general and for user interface development in particular in order to convey informal specifications of the interface before actually implementing it. It is quite interesting to observe that designers as well as end users have abilities to sketch parts or whole of the final user interface they want, while discussing the advantages and shortcomings. SketchiXML consists of a multiplatform multi-agent interactive application that enables designers, developers, or even end users to sketch user interfaces with different levels of details and support for different contexts of use. The results of the sketching are then analyzed to produce interface specifications independently of any context, including user and platform. These specifications are exploited to progressively produce one or several interfaces, for one or many users, platforms, and environments.

Software support for user interface description language

A User Interface Description Language (UIDL) is a formal language used in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) in order to describe a particular user interface independently of any implementation. Considerable research effort has been devoted to defining various meta-models in order to define rigorously the semantics of a UIDL. These meta-models adhere to the principle of separation of concerns. Any aspect of concern should univocally fall into one of the following meta-models: context of use (user, platform, environment), task, domain, abstract user interface, concrete user interface, usability (including accessibility), workflow, organization, evolution, program, transformation, and mapping. Not all these meta-models should be used concurrently, but may be manipulated during different steps of a user interface development method. In order to support this kind of development method, software is required throughout the user interface development life cycle in order to create, edit, check models that are compliant with these meta-models and to produce user interfaces out of these methods. This workshop is aimed at reviewing the state of the art of software support for a UIDL in the context of any development method (e.g., formal method, model-based, model-driven). From this review, a taxonomy of software support for UIDLs will emerge that will serve for describing, comparing, and exploring software support for UIDLs.