A model-based approach for developing polymorphic user interface dialogues

With the plethora of computing devices and the new era in end-user interaction, creating complex user interfaces of interactive software is very challenging. Devices are becoming more intelligent, user interfaces become more sophisticated in supporting user to carry out their interactive tasks. In order to address this complexity and the resulting diversity in supporting users’ needs, there is a need to exhibit capabilities for intuitive adaptations at all their levels (i.e., implementation, physical, syntactic, semantic) so they can instantiate themselves in multiple contexts of use, which is referred to as Polymorphic User Interfaces. Today’s demanding scenarios also require advanced interaction capabilities through user interface components that are not natively supported by the toolkits (i.e., non-standard widgets), thus requiring to supplement toolkit-based programming with facilities for constructing novel interaction object hierarchies and utilizing third-party interaction components. However, this combination fails to deliver multi-context dialogues that can be executed in different contexts of use, i.e., with different users carrying out their tasks on diverse platforms and devices in various environments. To address these challenges, this thesis attempts to bridge the gap between toolkit-based development and abstract notations, device-independent markup and the mapping of abstract components to platform- specific libraries by defining, applying and deploying a new methodology to implement advanced UIs. The original contribution of this methodology includes a Widget Specification Language (WSL) that extends current capabilities offered by model-based development methods by describing not only the standard widgets of toolkits but also the custom ones, non-native ones for today and even tomorrow’s interaction. The WSL was crafted after significant experience gained in toolkit-based programming and advanced development methods applied on it to produce novel interaction components and with an ongoing effort to cover a series of (programmatically-) complex construction(structuring) cases. A second contribution includes the definition and inclusion of models composed to provide the advantages of non-standard widgets in the context of the designed User Interfaces. This assumes offering development tools implemented to foster appropriate management and support of enacting methodology and its participating models. Finally, two difficult and demanding use cases demonstrated the level of complexity that this approach can handle in order to offer advanced (utilizing non-standard widgets) User Interface Dialogues.