The Research On Pattern-Oriented User Interface Generation Technology

Recently, the Information Technologies are extending from single desktop applications to various new interaction devices gradually with the highly development of the ubiquitous computing and the increasing of the multiple terminals. Accordingly, the requirement of multiple platform software is increasing sharply.However, the stable technology environment and using environment of applications on PC have been changed. Today, the UI developers are facing new challenges:on the one hand, the diversity of technology environment leads to that the same application on different platforms requires designing and development user interface many times; On the other hand, the diversity of using environment leads to the different availability requirements and characteristics of the user experience in the different using context for the same application.At present, the method of Model-Based User Interface Development can produce the final user interface by constructing the abstract interface model and instancing the transformation model gradually. It can solve the problem of the diversity of technology environment of UI development on various devices. But because of lacking the flexibility and suitability for reusing the knowledge experience in the process of constructing and transferring the model, it cannot meet the requirement of availability for the diversity of using environment. However, the UI pattern which has attracted much attention in the field of human-computer interaction provides the possible solutions for it. UI pattern is a common and reusable solution of interaction and visual structure in the graphical user interface. It focuses on the usability and design knowledge reuse when the user interacts with the system. Also, it can provide the abstract, half the abstract or the concrete modeling information for user interface development. Now, there are many mature pattern libraries of user interface. But most of they describe the interface pattern with text or rough draft. There is not a structural description method of UI pattern, which will make UI pattern applied to UI tools automatically or semi-automatically.This paper proposes a Pattern-Oriented User Interface Generation Technology, in short of POUI. It can help the developer generating the UI prototype interactively using UI pattern and meet the requirement of usability in various contexts to decrease the cost of UI development. There are two characteristics of the technology:First, introduce a multiple dimensional description framework, named Task-Interaction Architecture-Specific Interaction Design, in short of TIASID. It describes UI pattern from three dimensions including its task, interaction architecture and specific interaction design. And the different dimensions use the different description forms, and there are mapping relationships to each other. It can structured and multi-dimensional describe UI pattern with enrich use context and design experience. Second, apply the UI pattern to Model-Based UI development. It can improve the efficiency of development and meet availability requirements. Besides, we have constructed a simple library of UI patterns, designed and implemented a concrete instance of mobile-campus application. The instance verifies the feasibility and effectiveness of this method further.