Juan Manuel González-Calleros

A Theoretical Survey of User Interface Description Languages: Preliminary Results

A user interface description language (UIDL) consists of a specification language that describes various aspects of a user interface under development. A comparative review of some selected user interface description languages is produced in order to analyze how they support the various stages of user interface development life cycle and development goals, such as support for multi-platform, device-independence, modality independence, and content delivery. There has been a long history and tradition to attempt capturing the essence of user interfaces at various levels of abstraction for different purposes, including those of development. The recent return of this effort today gains more attraction, along with the dissemination of XML markup languages, and gives birth to many proposals for various user interface description languages. Consequently, an in-depth analysis of the salient features that make these languages different from each other is desired in order to identify when and where they are appropriate for a specific purpose. The review is conducted based on a systematic analysis grid and some user interfaces implemented with these languages.

A first draft of a Model-driven Method for Designing Graphical User Interfaces of Rich Internet Applications

The design and development of graphical user interfaces for rich Internet applications are well known difficult tasks with tools. The designers must be aware of the computing platform, the users characteristics (education, social background, among others) and the environment within users must interact with the application. We present a method to design this type of user interfaces that is model-based and applies an iterative series of XSLT transformations to translate the abstract modeled interface into a final user interface that is coded in a specific platform. In order to avoid the proprietary engines dependency for designing tasks. UsiXML is used to model all the levels. Several model based technologies have been proposed and in this paper we review a XML-compliant user interface description language: XAML

A Structured Approach to Support 3D User Interface Development

Given its current state of the art, Model-Based UI Development (MBDUI) is able to fulfill the major requirements of desktop and mobile applications, such as form-based user interfaces that adapt to the actual context of use. More recent research deals with the development of 3D interactive multimodal environments. Though user-centered design is more and more driving the design of these environments, less attention is devoted to the development processes than to interactive tools supporting isolated phases in the realization process. In this paper we present an attempt to structure an approach to support 3DUIs development by introducing a MBDUI compliant method. The development method is articulated on three axes: models and their specification language, approach, and tools that support the method based on the underlying models.

Towards Canonical Task Types for User Interface Design

Task models are the cornerstone of user-centred design methodologies for user interface design. Therefore, they deserve attention in order to produce them effectively and efficiently, while guaranteeing the reproducibility of a task model: different persons should in principle obtain the same task model, or a similar one, for the same problem. In order to provide user interface designers with some guidance for task modelling, a list of canonical task types is proposed that offers a unified definition of frequently used tasks types in a consistent way. Each task type consists of a task action coupled with a task object, each of them being written according to design guidelines. This list provides the following benefits: tasks are modelled in a more consistent way, their definition is more communicable and shared, task models can be efficiently used for model-driven engineering of user interfaces.

A Model-Based Approach for Developing Vectorial User Interfaces

This paper presents a model-based approach for developing vectorial user interfaces to an interactive applications, whether it is a web or a stand-alone applications. A vectorial user interface exhibits the capability of being rescaled in any dimension without any loss of information, while taking advantage of the screen real estate offered by the computing platform on which the interactive application is running. A model describes the vectorial user interface in order to capture its presentation and behavior in a way that is independent of any context of use. Implemented as a browser plug-in, a rendering engine parses this model at run-time so as to render the user interface bounded with the domain, thus producing together a running application. This facilitates platform adaptation, since the interface scales up or down depending on the screen resolution and user adaptation since the model can change from one session to another. The interface is then re-rendered with adaptation for the benefit of the end user. Both platform and user adaptations contribute to making the web application accessible in a ubiquitous way.

Model Driven Engineering of Rich Internet Applications Equipped with Zoomable User Interfaces

The development of a Rich Internet Application is particularly challenging because its user interface can involve highly interactive techniques that require substantive programming that is mostly done by hand nowadays. This paper addresses this challenge by introducing a model-driven engineering approach where a zoomable user interface of such a Rich Internet Application is obtained successively by performing the following steps: the Computing Independent Model level consists of modeling a task for the future interface based on a list of canonical task types augmented by custom tasks, each task being mapped onto a domain model; the Platform Independent Model level consists of exploiting the structure and the temporal operators of this task model in order to generate one or many abstract user interfaces that will lead in turn to concrete user interfaces structured according to the principles of a zoomable user interface at the Platform Specific Model level.

Design and engineering of game-like virtual and multimodal environments

This workshop brings together a number of researchers that are involved in the design, engineering, evaluation and applicability of game-like virtual and multimodal environments. It is a forum to discuss experiences, best practices, and design and engineering approaches with a particular focus on those aspects that are related to the interactivity of the game.

Towards Model-Game-Based Rehabilitation Information System

Everyday people suffer accidents at home while doing activities of daily life, resulting in physical and cognitive injuries that need physiotherapy rehabilitation. Some problems of physiotherapy reported by physiotherapists are lack of commitment of the patient, lack of motivation, and lack of immediate feedback conveying patients their progress. Thus, it is very frequents that patients abandon their therapy. This paper presents our research towards the development of a model-game-based rehabilitation information system. Our proposal being model-based allows easy integration of games which is a step forward compared to existing work from the literature, where is majorly art-based and lack of design knowledge, if exists, to reproduce their solutions. With the advancement of technology, mainly Internet and plug-ins, our system is available for patients, who only need a device and Internet to run the application. Specialists can monitor their progress, allowing patients to make their rehabilitation at the time that they can.

Methodology for the development of vocal user interfaces

Natural User Interfaces allow users to interact with systems similarly as they interact with people. Human communications occur, mostly, in an oral way, since personal dialogs to phone calls and more recently in complain or information systems; the tendency is to automate some of these activities so the user might complete tasks in a more efficient way. The necessity for having a methodology that supports the development of vocal interfaces is therefore taking interest on it. The objective for this sample paper is to establish a methodology and to describe a set of rules that might be used for developing a software tool to generate code for multiplatform vocal User Interfaces from models.

Getting Research Findings into Practice: Guidelines to Produce Quality Software Engineering Diagrams to Assist Novice Engineers

Computer Diagrams are the communication mechanism among the different stakeholders of the software development lifecycle. While they are though at school, and promoted to be used by students for current and future projects, we still do not see full adoption in real life context. The literature reviewed points out some reasons related to this issue and propose some solutions, but still the problem persist. In this paper, we present our findings of three years of research at the University while working with senior students on real-life projects. Different methodologies were used as an iterative process, improving the quality of the results year by year. We present the lesson learned including guidelines on how to facilitate novice engineers to adopt diagrams and produce them with high quality standards. The proposal is validated with a real life case study.