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USer Interface eXtensible Markup Language (USIXML) consists of a User Interface Description Language (UIDL) allowing designers to apply a multi-path development of user interfaces. In this development paradigm, a user interface can be specified and produced at and from different, and possibly multiple, levels of abstraction while maintaining the mappings between these levels if required. Thus, the development process can be initiated from any level of abstraction and proceed towards obtaining one or many final user interfaces for various contexts of use at other levels of abstraction. In this way, the model-to-model transformation which is the cornerstone of Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) can be supported in multiple configurations, based on composition of three basic transformation types: abstraction, reification, and translation.

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INTRODUCTION User-Centered Design (UCD) has yielded many forms of design practices in which various characteristics of the context of use are considered. Among these, task analysis is widely recognized as one fundamental way not only to ensure some user-centered design (Hackos & Redish, 1998) but to improve the understanding of how a user may interact with a user interface to accomplish a given interactive task. A task model is often defined as a description of an interactive task to be performed by the user of an application through the application's user interface. Individual elements in a task model represent specific actions that the user may undertake. Information on subtask ordering as well as conditions on task execution is also included in the model. 135 LE071-06 LE071-Diaper & Stanton LE071-Diaper-v2.cls July 30, 2003 11:20 Char Count= 0 136 LIMBOURG AND VANDERDONCKT Task analysis methods have been introduced from disciplines with different backgrounds, different concerns,

Abstract. Most existing graphical user interfaces are usually designed for a fixed context of use, thus making them rather difficult to modify for other contexts of use, such as for other users, other platforms, and other environments. This paper addresses this problem by introducing a new visual design method for graphical users interfaces referred to as “visual design by (de)composition”. In this method, any individual or composite component of a graphical user interface is submitted to a series of operations for composing a new interface from existing components and for decomposing an existing one into smaller pieces that can be used in turn for another interface. For this purpose, any component of a user interface is described by specifications that are consistently written in a user interface description language that remains hidden to the designers ’ eyes. We first define the composition and decomposition operations and individually exemplify them on some small examples. We then demonstrate how they can be used to visually design new interfaces for a real-world case study where variations of the context of use induce frequent recomposition of user interfaces. Finally, we describe how the operations are implemented in a dedicated interface builder supporting the aforementioned method. 1

Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) has recently attracted interest of both research community and industry corporations. It specifies an automated process of developing interactive applications from high-level models to code generation. This approach can play a key role in the fields of Software Engineering (SE) and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). However, although there are some MDA-compliant methods to develop user interfaces, none of them explicitly integrates usability engineering to user interface engineering. This chapter addresses this issue by showing how the usability of user interfaces that are automatically generated by an industrial MDA-compliant CASE tool can be assessed. The goal is to investigate if

The design of user interfaces is a step which takes a long time. The automatic generation of these interfaces induces shorter durations. With this automatic generation, the UIDLs have appeared. They allow specifying an interface using a Description Language. A step which also takes a long time is the redesigning of the user interface to take into accounts users remarks. We propose to use the operators of the tree algebra with a UIDL as UsiXML which is structured as a tree to improve this step of design. These operators help the designer to modify the interfaces and to reuse parts of interfaces. We have estimated the saving of time in two case studies.

Sketching consists of a widely practiced activity during early design phases of product in general and for user interface development in particular in order to convey informal specifications of the interface before actually implementing it. It is quite interesting to observe that designers as well as end users have abilities to sketch parts or whole of the final user interface they want, while discussing the advantages and shortcomings. SketchiXML consists of a multiplatform multi-agent interactive application that enables designers, developers, or even end users to sketch user interfaces with different levels of details and support for different contexts of use. The results of the sketching are then analyzed to produce interface specifications independently of any context, including user and platform. These specifications are exploited to progressively produce one or several interfaces, for one or many users, platforms, and environments.

This paper focuses on the techniques involved in building an interactive application using a plastic user interface. These techniques take advantage of the QTk toolkit, a toolkit that features unusual but interesting concepts with respect to more classical object-oriented toolkits. These features are possible thanks to the underlying programming language used, Oz, and in particular: its support to symbolic records equivalent to XML structures and its capacity to wrap any languages entities into higher order data structures. This paper shows by a case study how the combination of QTk and Oz helps developers write plastic user interface very easily.

Description Language (UIDL) allowing designers to specify a user interface at multiple levels of abstraction depending on the development path they are following: task and concepts, abstract user interface, concrete user interface, and final user interface. These levels support to some extent independence with respect to device, computing platform, modality of interaction, channel of information, and context of use. A single user interface can be specified and produced at and from different, possibly multiple, levels of abstraction while maintaining the mappings between these levels if required. Thus, the development process can be initiated from any level of abstraction and proceed towards obtaining one or many final user interfaces for various contexts of use (forward engineering), by recovering the final user interface into any upper level (reverse engineering), or by adapting at any level of abstraction (reengineering). 1