Research On A Pattern-Based User Interface Presentation Model And Its Implementation

In recent years, with the maturity of mobile technology, all kinds of new-type interactive mobile devices swarm into the market constantly, which brings many new challenges to the user interface designers. On the one hand, for the same application, designers need to spend a lot of time and effort in designing the UI (user interface) for different devices; On the other hand, since the stable using environment on the traditional PC has been broken, how to design the UI and utilize them easily in the different using environment has become a challenge for the UI designers.Current model-based UI development method generates the end-user interface for different devices by creating a series of abstract interface model, instantiating and mapping them to different devices, which can reduce the designers' effort to some extent and enhance the efficiency of the UI development. However, the presentation model in model-based approach when is created uses the simple UI controls as its basic design unit. This model only considers the objects which should be presented on the user interface, lacking of consideration of the relationship between these objects, which result in the UI developed with this model lacks usability.At present, the UI pattern widely recognized in the field of human-computer interaction provides a possible solution for it. The UI pattern is a combination of a plurality of basic UI controls that are organized based on the designers'long-term design experience and encapsulates the UI design knowledge. By introducing the UI pattern into the interface presentation model and using the UI pattern as the basic UI design unit can improve the UI usability effectively. However, a majority of the patterns are often described by adopting the nature language or sketches, which makes them only provide design guidelines for designers, but cannot directly be applied to automated or semi-automated generation tools when developing the UI. Designers must manually write UI code.In terms of those issues, this paper addresses a new Pattern-Based User Interface Presentation Model(P-BUIPM) which optimizes and improves the traditional one. Developing the UI using P-BUIPM can improve designers'efficiency to develop UI and ensure the UI usability in the meantime. In order to achieve this model, firstly, this paper addresses a XML-Based Structured Pattern Descriptive Language(X-BSPDL) which makes the UI pattern applied to UI development tools directly and avoids designers writing UI code manually, improving the efficiency of UI development effectively. After that this paper also implements a simple UI pattern library; Secondly, absorbing and learning the design concept of the UI pattern, this paper introduces the UI pattern into the UI presentation model and uses the UI pattern as the basic UI design unit which can effectively reuse UI controls and design knowledge, improving UI usability effectively.