| An ecological interface (EI) is a particular type of UI that allows its user to adapt to unforeseen events by explicitly displaying the work domain functional hierarchy, that is, all the interrelated constraints governing the work domain. Concretely, an EI incorporates a set of visual components, that is, a combination of geometric shapes, each corresponding to one of these constraints. In order to help the EI designer, the literature presents a visual thesaurus. It is a catalogue of reusable visual components. Thus, the EI designer does not have to design each individual visual component for a new EI, but needs only to select the appropriate visual components from the catalogue and organize them on a display area.;This difference in structures constitutes a barrier in using the visual thesaurus in the sense that the EI designer needs to redefine the constraints initially defined during work domain analysis to match the structure of the visual components that are part of the catalogue. To solve this problem, this thesis proposes a new modeling language for work domain analysis, called WoDoMoLEID, based on the meta-model of EI's. Its objective is twofold. On the one hand, it should allow defining in an integrated manner all information essential to the design of EI's, that is, objects, constraints and the functional hierarchy of a work domain. On the other hand, because of its structure, it it should allow a direct correspondence with reusable visual components. This last point is the first step towards automating the process of selecting reusable visual components.;In order to evaluate the proposed modeling language, it was applied to the financial assets portfolio management work domain. In addition, a modeling software prototype has been developed and a catalogue of reusable visual components has been created. The results show that WoDoMoLEID can achieve both aforementioned objectives.;Because the visual components represent graphically the work domain constraints, there should be a direct correspondence between them and their definition during analysis. It is not the case. In an EI design context, the literature presents the abstraction and decomposition hierarchy (ADH) as the only work domain representation. However, EI design requires more than what is represented by the ADH. That is why it needs to be completed by a list of variables and a list of equations. The ADH is only a high-level view of the functional hierarchy. As for the list of variables and the list of equations, both based on the ADH, they are used to define the work domain constraints that compose the functional hierarchy. The problem is that the definition of the work domain constraints as a list of equations is not based on the same structure as the one the visual components are based on. In the first case, the constraints are freely written in the form of mathematical equations. In the second case, the visual components are based on a precise structure of relationships between terms and operators. |
