A Toolkit Of Interactive Components For Interface Patterns And Its Implementation

Nowadays,industry used pattern-based methods and techniques in user interface design widely.The use of patterns can decrease the pressure of interface development and help inexperienced developers develop a functional and easy-to-use user interface quickly.From the point of design view,it is clear that the user interface pattern is an effective solution to common problems in design,and it is an optimal design practice that can be reused.From the point of implementation view,it is clear that the pattern can be seen as a structured organization of components.Currently,a pattern-based interface design method provides patterns for interface design,helping developers to transform requirements into interface design solutions and improving the effectiveness and efficiency of interface design effectively.However,the interface pattern is only an informal description of the interface design.The implementation of the pattern still faces challenges.Existing development platforms(such as Android SDK,IOS,and so on)only provide small-grained interactive components(such as input boxes,buttons,menus,etc.).The developer must use appropriate components to implement the specified interface pattern and interaction strategy,and map the interface patterns to the basic components manually.There are two problems we recognized and the first is that if the developer lacks related design experience,using a small-scale component to implement a pattern may cause deviations in the design results.Second,the same pattern for different applications would require repeated development and then increase the workload of interface development.There is a difference between the level of the design pattern and the level of the development platform,which requires the developer make additional efforts.To solve this problem,this thesis constructs a pattern components toolkit based on widget library of the existing platform.The large-grained components inner encapsulate the interface pattern and its design knowledge.From the interface design to the implementation process based on pattern,it is only necessary to select and use the large-grained pattern components directly without considering the construction of the patterns at the low level.Which means that it allows developers to develop the interfaces on the pattern components levels which saves time for manual mapping of interface patterns to widgets and improves interface development efficiency while ensuring the usability of the interface.This thesis also proposes a pattern markup language which is a unified description and rapid prototyping to pattern components.This language helps to assist the implementation of the toolkit and improve its extensibility.The toolkit`s effectiveness and feasibility in the development of user interface has been proved by a case study.