A Method for Generating Multiplatform User Interfaces for E-Learning Environments

Task models are widely used in the field of user interface development. They represent a human actor’s performance or the co-operation of a group of people on or together with a system. For considerable time, it was an open problem in the field how to switch from the analyzing step of task analysis and modeling to the synthesizing step of user interface design. In the meantime, interesting approaches have shown up dealing with this problem and helping to bridge the gap between task modeling and user interface development. In this chapter, some of these approaches are discussed, together with recent concepts used to improve the usability of user interfaces based upon underlying task models.

The present manuscript-based doctoral thesis addresses the question of how approaches to interaction design can be made more structured. This is an attempt to make it more transparent how one can come to a final design of a user interface starting from the results of foundational user research. The results of this analysis can help designers to work very systematic at times, to better reflect on their own idiosyncratic design process “on the job”, or to learn interaction design in the first place. In user-centered design (UCD) there are lifecycles and methods that already provide a certain degree of structuring with the discrimination of different phases etc. But they leave open some gaps here and there. This work is an attempt to close some of the gaps and bring closer together these individual methods. Interaction design patterns are a way to describe solutions to problems in designing user in-terfaces in a very systematic way. However, pattern libraries usually are far from complete. They mostly lack patterns to support the early phases of interaction design and therefore they do usually not link to the abstract models of conceptual design. The third manuscript describes an organizational scheme for interaction design patterns to support the process of implementing a complete pattern language covering all the different levels of the solution domain. The scheme has been found by analyzing several established UCD lifecycles and it has been evaluated by organizing all the individual patterns of several public pattern libraries into it. The first manuscript describes a process of systematically building up a pattern language alongside of a redesign project of a complex application in a corporate environment. The second manuscript describes how patterns have been evaluated in the aforementioned project, when there were several different solutions for one problem. This is shown with two interaction design patterns for the problem of making required input fields visible to users. The fourth manuscript is an attempt to bring together the idea of a complete pattern language, as a description of the solution domain of interaction design, with the different parts of the problem domain. Therefore, the same UCD lifecycles (as in the third manuscript) have been analyzed to find a universal structure of the problem domain. Then all the mappings between the individual parts of the two domains have been described in order to link the two domains in this direct way. Another way of looking at the gap between the problem domain and the solution domain is by seeing it as a distance of levels of abstraction between results of foundational user research and the final user interface. From this point of view a bridging of the gap can be seen in different intermediate representations (abstract models, sketches, and prototypes) and linking them together in a coherent way. These different ways of bridging the gap between foundational user research and the final design of a user interface can be seen as cognitive artifacts to foster problem solving and learning of interaction designers.

This PhD thesis is focused on a pattern approach for designing multi-platform user interfaces. The pattern approach is applied on the complete user interface (UI) development process. UI patterns can be used to improve the usability and cycle-life development. To achieve a good quality of software development, UI patterns related to ergonomic context can be used in unification of models to support the UI development process. UI Patterns of the OO-Method are introduced in the whole model driven process of UI in order to obtain different UIs in the Final User Interface (FUI) level including specific platforms. In using different patterns on other devices, the thesis analyses the derivation of up-to-date UIs with the application of the built ergonomic guide and extended patterns. A comparative study of these different FUIs built in different contexts is necessary to show how difficult it is to adapt the different patterns on variety platforms.

The increasing adoption of process-aware information systems (PAISs) has resulted in a large number of implemented business processes. To react on changing needs, companies should be able to quickly adapt these process implementations if required. Current PAISs, however, only provide mechanisms to evolve the schema of a process model, but do not allow for the automated creation and adaptation of their user interfaces (UIs). The latter may have a complex logic and comprise, for example, conditional elements or database queries. Creating and evolving the UI components of a PAIS manually is a tedious and error-prone task. This technical report introduces a set of patterns for transforming fragments of a business process model, whose activities are performed by the same user role, to UI components of the PAIS. In particular, UI logic can be expressed using the same notation as for process modeling. Furthermore, a transformation method is introduced, which applies these patterns to automatically derive UI components from a process model by establishing a bidirectional mapping between process model and UI. This mapping allows propagating UI changes to the process model and vice versa. Overall, our approach enables process designers to rapidly develop and update complex UI components in PAISs.

This paper defines a model-driven approach for organizational engineering in which user interfaces of information systems are derived from business processes. This approach consists of four steps: business process modeling in the context of organizational engineering, task model derivation from the business process model, task refinement, and user interface model derivation from the task model. Each step contributes to specify and refine mappings between the source and the target model. In this way, each model modification could be adequately propagated in the rest of the chain. By applying this model-driven approach, the user interfaces of the information systems are directly meeting the requirements of the business processes and are no longer decoupled from them. This approach has been validated on a case study in a large bank-insurance company.

Knowledge-based support for user adapted interaction design

This paper presents the development of the user interface for the Robovolc volcano exploration robot. The discussion examines the important issues, concepts that need to be considered and the lessons learnt during the overall development phase. The process by which the final user interface was developed is also described, examining the key stages and decisions that were made. Lastly, results of the final tests carried out on Mount Etna are also discussed.

The design and systematic development of usable user interfaces (UI) is becoming increasingly important. The use of task models is considered to be the main approach for the specification of the presentation tier in interactive applications. The task modelling for the specification of the interaction in a complex application may require the participation of several designers/engineers. In this paper, the use of a generic modelling groupware tool, SPACE-DESIGN, is proposed for task modelling using CTT notation. To evaluate the benefit of the approach, a comparative study has been conducted with two groups of experienced users: the first group carried out a task modelling activity with SPACE-DESIGN and the other one with the CTTE tool shared by means of Microsoft NetMeeting. Results and conclusions of the study are discussed.

Workflow-based web applications are important in workflow management systems as they interact with users of business processes. With the Model-driven approach, user interfaces (UIs) of these applications can be partially generated based on functional and data requirements obtained from underlying process models. In traditional activity-centric modelling approaches, data models and relationships between tasks and data are not clearly defined in the process model; thus, it is left to UI modellers to manually identify data requirement in generated UIs. We observed that artifact-centric approaches can be applied to address the above problems. However, it brings in challenges to automatically generate UIs due to the declarative manner of describing the processes. In this paper, we propose a model-based automatic UI generation framework with related algorithms for deriving UIs from process models.

This study investigates how schoolchildren organise their spatial and epistemic ‘territories’ among peer groups to constitute local social and moral orders in open learning environments. Open learning environments, the result of recent school reforms in Finland, challenge the conventional organisation of traditional classrooms. We use a microanalysis of naturally occurring video-recorded interactions to show the interactional dynamics of how children produce epistemic and spatial territories by creating moment-by-moment unfolding participation frameworks and emotional alliances. We suggest that the lack of institutional structures in open learning environments withholds children from the territorial shelters that exist in more traditional classrooms. Therefore, open learning environments make students and their peer groups more vulnerable in terms of their social face (Goffman, 1955), including their competence and skills, as they are constantly exposed to other people's observations and criticisms of and interventions in their peer groups. Our results shed light on the tendency of human beings to produce spatial and epistemic structures and moral orders where none exist.

This paper presents an approach of generating the user interface from the task model. Our work is situated in the course of approaches based on models. This approach called TOOD (Task Object Oriented Design) is based on a formal notation, which gives quantitative results that may be checked by designers and provide the possibility of performing mathematical verifications on the models. The modelling formalism is based on the joint use of the object approach and high level Petri nets. The TOOD method integrates different models (task model, user model, local model of the interface, abstract model of the interface, and model of the implementation) and their relations. An example, extracted from the air traffic control, is presented to illustrate TOOD methodology.

In this paper we describe how the identification of usability tasks in the task model as an early consideration of usability in the process can directly influence the design of usable User Interfaces (UI). We intend to make system analysts and UI designers work and communicate better by sharing artifacts, thus providing a process that aims at the integration of professionals working with a productive process in order to develop UIs with usability.

This chapter claims that task models per se do not contain sufficient and necessary information to permit automatic generation of interactive systems. Beyond this, we claim that they must not contain sufficient and necessary information otherwise they could no longer be considered as task models. On the contrary we propose a way of exploiting in a synergistic way task models with other models to be built during the development process. This chapter presents a set of tools supporting the development of interactive systems using two different notations. One of these notations called ConcurTaskTree (CTT) is used for task modeling. The other notation called Interactive Cooperative Objects (ICO) is used for system modeling. Even though these two kinds of models represent two different views of the same world (a user interacting with an interactive system), they are built by different people (human factors specialist for the task models and software engineer for the system models) and are used independently. The aim of this chapter is to propose the use of scenarios as a bridge between these two views. On the task modeling side, scenarios are seen as a possible trace of user’s activity. On the system side, scenarios are seen as a trace of user’s actions. This generic approach is presented on a case study in the domain of Air Traffic Control. As both CTT and ICO notations are tool supported (environments are respectively CTTE and PetShop) an integration tool based on this notion of scenarios is presented. Its use on the selected case study is also presented in detail.KeywordsModel CheckerUser ServiceInteractive SystemTask ModelRadar ImageThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

The main idea surrounding Model-Based User Interface (MBUI) engineering is to identify useful abstractions that highlight the core aspects and properties of an interactive system and its design. These abstractions are instantiated and iteratively transformed at different levels to create a concrete user interface. However, certain limitations prevent user interface (UI) developers from adopting model-based approaches for UI engineering. One such limitation is the lack of reusability of best design practices and knowledge within such approaches. With a view to fostering reuse in the instantiation and transformation of models, we introduce patterns as building blocks, which can be first used to construct different models and then instantiated into concrete UI artifacts. In particular, we will demonstrate how different kinds of patterns can be used as modules for establishing task, dialog, presentation, and layout models. Starting from an outline of the general process of pattern application, an interface for combining patterns and a possible formalization are suggested. The Task Pattern Wizard, tool we developed, uses an eXtensible markup language (XML approach. It is built on eXtensible user languages (XUL)-based. This tool helps designers for selecting, adapting, and applying patterns to task models. In addition, an extended example will illustrate the intimate complicity of several patterns and the proposed model-driven approach.KeywordsUnify Modeling LanguageTask ModelInteraction ElementFloor PlanTask StructureThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Declarative models play an important role in most software design activities, by allowing designs to be constructed that selectively abstract over complex implementation details. In the user interface setting, Model-Based User Interface Development Environments (MB-UIDEs) provide a context within which declarative models can be constructed and related, as part of the interface design process. However, such declarative models are not usually directly executable, and may be difficult to relate to existing software components. It is therefore important that MB-UIDEs both fit in well with existing software architectures and standards, and provide an effective route from declarative interface specification to running user interfaces. This paper describes how user interface software is generated from declarative descriptions in the Teallach MB-UIDE. Distinctive features of Teallach include its open architecture, which connects directly to existing applications and widget sets, and the generation of executable interface applications in Java. This paper focuses on how Java programs, organized using the model-view-controller pattern (MVC), are generated from the task, domain and presentation models of Teallach.