A Model Transformation Approach To Model-based User Interface Development And Its Implementation

With a large number of mobile devices and applications enter the market,many applications with the same functionality appear immediately.How the user selects them,a important reason is the user interface(UI)of the application that directly communicate to the end user.User experiences determine a user whether choose the application.So the UI designers may face two challenges: One is need to quickly develop the UI to meet the time requirements of market competition;the other is how to make the UI easily used by users(easy to learn,easy to understand and easy to operate,etc.).In order to deal with the first challenge,the HCI community proposes a model-based user interface development method(MBUID)to solve the problem of the application UI development productivity.It uses a process of model transformation,and builds a model from the user's requirements and gradually converts it into a model about specific platform,eventually become XML format codes.However,such a method is not easy to guarantee the usability of the UI.Therefore,the industry uses a pattern-based UI design method.Through summarizes designers' excellent design experiences to give proposals about UI development,so as to ensure good usability of user interfaces.However,the patterns we used now are mostly informal descriptions and cannot be effectively integrated into the automation process to increase development efficiency.This paper proposes a method PMM(Pattern-Model Method)that applies patterns to the MBUID model transformation.The method has the following characteristics: First,it has a formal representation of the pattern;second,it classifies the pattern and defines the relationship between them;and third,it combines the instance of patterns with the model to achieve model transformation.Also design a transformation tool PIMT(Pattern in Model Transformation)to semi-automatic support for the implementation of the method.It aims to improve the usability of user interfaces based on MBUID.Through case studies,to some extent,the results show that the PMM method and the PIMT tool have improved the usability of the UI.