Posts tagged: Education

D-macs: Building multi-device user interfaces by demonstrating, sharing and replaying design actions

Multi-device user interface design mostly implies creating a suitable interface for each targeted device, using a diverse set of design tools and toolkits. This is a time consuming activity, concerning a lot of repetitive design actions without support for reusing this effort in later designs. In this pa- per, we propose D-Macs: a design tool that allows designers to record their design actions across devices, to share these actions with other designers and to replay their own design actions and those of others. D-Macs lowers the burden in multi-device user interface design and can reduce the neces- sity for manually repeating design actions.

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The mapping problem back and forth: Customizing dynamic models while preserving consistency

Model-Based User Interface Development uses a multitude of models which are related in one way or another. Usu- ally there is some kind of process that starts with the design of the abstract models and progresses gradually towards the more concrete models, resulting in the final user interface when the design process is complete. Progressing from one model to another involves transforming the model and map- ping pieces of information contained in the source model onto the target model. Most existing development environ- ments propose solutions that apply these steps (semi-)automatically in one way only (from abstract to concrete models). Man- ual intervention that changes the target model (e.g. dialog model) to the designer preferences is not reflected in the source model (e.g. task model), thus this step can introduce inconsistencies between the different models. In this paper, we identify some rules that can be manually applied to the model after a transformation has taken place. The effect on the target and source models are shown together with how different models involved in the transformation can be up- dated accordingly to ensure consistency between models.

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