Defining Domain Specific Transformations in Human-Computer interfaces development

Early model-based approaches for Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) clearly depicted models and frameworks for generating User Interfaces (UI) but considered model transformations as black-boxes. In the 2000´s, these approaches were criticized due to the poor quality of the produced UI. One of the main reasons of this poor quality can be easily observed in state of the art UI transformations: they are the heart of designers´ know-how but are maintained by a minority of specialists. Meanwhile, mainstream UI design methods have shown a growing number of heterogeneous stakeholders that collaborate to produce modern and qualitative UI. We claim that these stakeholders must comprehend and interact with transformations and thus we need to make the transformation language affordable to these stakeholders. Indeed, such a simplification should hide transformations complexity and burden for any stakeholder, finally focusing on a specific part of the design domain: a Domain Specific Language (DSL) for transformations or Domain Specific Transformation Language (DSTL). We provide in this paper a method and a supporting tool for systematizing and finally executing DSTL for model-driven UI development. We depict that framework on a proof of concept implementation for an HCI-specific stakeholder: the usability expert.