Research on a Pattern-Based User Interface Development Method

With the sharply increasing of mobile devices, the diversity of UI clearly brings challenges to UI developers, namely, how to efficiently develop user-friendly UI for different devices. Current study usually focuses on the model-based development approach which can help designers establish user interface models at the higher abstract level in order to satisfy the heterogeneity of the devices and improve the efficiency of UI development. However, due to the fact of focusing on semantic information but ignoring the interaction characteristics of specific equipment, this approach is versatility and cannot ensure the UI usability effectively. In terms of those issues, this study addresses a new way to develop UI on the basis of UI patterns (UIPs). It integrates UIPs with the model-based approach so as to improve designers´ efficiency of developing UI and ensure the UI usability in the meantime. This method firstly introduces a XML-Based structured pattern descriptive language" -- X-BSPDL. Using this language can bring convenience to help computers analyze the UIPs and integrate them with automated tools. In this way, developers can relieve themselves from labor work, namely, UI code writing. On the basis of this, this study builds a simple UIPs library and addresses a UI development framework based on UI patterns. The framework introduces the usability-based UIPs to a model-based development approach and uses UIPs as the transformation tools between models, which can effectively increase the efficiency of developing UI and ensure the UI usability in the meantime.