Research On The Pattern-Based Visual Environment For User Interface Designing And Its Implementation

Nowadays, as a diversity of mobile devices has been entering the customer market, user interface developers are facing a new challenge, that is how to improve the usability of user interfaces as well as to ensure the development efficiency.To address this challenge, part of research effort on user interface software has focused on how to make user interface "writing once and running everywhere" on an abstract level by providing available modeling methods and developing tools, such as the popularly used model-based approach to the development of user interfaces. However, the question that how to meet the usability requirements of user interfaces still remains open.In contract with the traditional approaches to manual development,the automated ones with the supporting tools based on rules transformation can improve the development efficiency to a large extent,However,it is difficult for the automated approaches to ensure the usability of user interfaces. The reason is that the rules, although can be used to simply describe the implementation process of design tasks rightly, but they are helpless to express the semantic information associates with the usability of user interfaces. It can offer a potential solution to the problem by means of introducing the user interface patterns, UIPs in short, into the interface development tools. Thus the usability information can be described by the UIPs and the tasks can be carried on correctly by the transformation rules, as a result,the final user interface can be generated successfully.This paper proposes a visual user interface development environment in short of VIDE based on user interface patterns. The implementation of VIDE can be considered as two folds: design a user interface design patterns library which encapsulates the usability on the basis of existing ones, in fact it is an improvement and optimization of the existing ones. For the purpose of human and machine readable, this paper presents a new approach to describe UIPs, which is the combination of unstructured description based on text and structured description based on XML respectively. To implement the UIPs library as a user interface component library on the Android platform.VIDE has the following features:1) it implements the purpose of "what you see is what you control" as it offers an draggable and droppable components for user to develop user interfaces, compare with writing code,directly operation is more quickly, so it improves the developing efficiency.2) it encapsulates the usability design knowledge, therefore, it satisfies the usability needs.