Customized UI Development Through Context-Sensitive GUI Patterns

Abstract

Developing highly flexible and easy to use user interfaces (UIs) for software applications that satisfy different usage contexts is a challenging task. Model-driven UI development (MDUID) approaches support the generation of multiple variants of a UI for different target users, platforms and environments. However, these approaches are not always sufficient because of usability issues which require manual changes for UI customizations. To overcome this deficit, we present a MDUID process that integrates context-sensitive GUI patterns to support the development of flexible and customized UIs. The integration and situation specific application of GUI patterns enable the creation of user tailored UIs and leverage a personalized interaction. For showing the feasibility of our approach, we formalized and implemented a set of context-sensitive GUI patterns based on the Interaction Flow Modeling Language (IFML). We demonstrate our pattern application concept and tool-support based on a customized MDUID process for generating the UI of a calendar management application.