Storyboards are excellent tools to create a high level specification of an interactive system. Because of the emphasis on graphical depiction they are both an accessible means for communicating the requirements and properties of an interactive system and allow the specification of complex context-aware systems while avoiding the need for technical details. We present a storyboard meta-model that captures the high level information from a storyboard and al- lows relating this information with other models that are common for engineering interactive systems. We show that a storyboard can be used as an entry point for using UsiXML models. Finally, this approach is accompanied by a tool set to make the connection between the storyboard model, UsiXML models and the program code required for maintaining these connections throughout the engineering process.

Methods to support the creation of multi-device user interfaces typically use some type of abstraction of the user interface design. To retrieve the final user interface from the abstraction a transformation will be applied that specializes the abstraction for a particular target platform. The User Interface Markup Language (UIML) offers a way to create multi-device user interface descriptions while maintaining the consistency of certain aspects of a user interface across platforms. We extended the UIML language with support for layout constraints. Designers can create layout templates based on constraints that limit the ways a user interface can rearrange across platforms. This results in a higher degree of consistency and reusability of interface designs.