Research On A User Interface Pattern Markup Language And Implementation Of A Visualization Tool

The user interface is an important part of interactive application,and it has been increasingly gotten attention.Nowadays we are facing a new challenge,that is,how to build a usable application efficiently.The development of the user interface often demands designers for a handful of design knowledge and experience,as well as effective design guidelines.In the industry,to address this challenge,there exist a number of methods using a user interface pattern.A user interface pattern is the induction and conceptualization of knowledge and experience,and the role of which is to propose successful solutions for designers.The rational use of it can not only improve the quality and efficiency of the interface design,but also provide the guidance for novice and make the development of interface more efficient.The presentation of current pattern set is not,however,conducive for the designers understanding and using.First of all,the pattern contains a wealth of experience and theoretical knowledge of the designer,it is difficult for ordinary programmers or beginners to acquire and understand the empirical information contained in the pattern quickly.This will lead to a gap between the design and implementation.Second,the pattern is mostly expressed in the form of natural language,text,sketch and so on,and which can only be used as a reference for interface design,but cannot be directly applied to the process of interface generation.Moreover,the existing pattern description is very different in format and content,and it lacks structural.So it is not conducive to the retrieve and application of the pattern.In order to solve the above problems,this paper proposes a XML-based user interface pattern markup language called UIPML,and a visualization tool named PVTs.The UIPML can describe the basic and the presentation information of a pattern in structural,which make the pattern has a unified form and can be used in the interface development directly,and ensure the consistency of design and implementation.At the same time,the PVTs achieves the view,search,parse and other functions of the UIPML pattern.It can help designers quickly retrieve a pattern,and use the consistent pattern in the pattern-based desgin and implementation of the user interface.Thus improve the efficiency and quality of the interface development.