Research On Pattern-Based Multi-device User Interface Generation And Its Implementation

With the development of pervasive computing, a variety of mobile devices swarm into the market, and the diversity of devices bring a new challenge to the user interface developer: how to develop a user interface efficiently with the high usability in the different mobile devices for the same application.In order to solve the problem of diversity, there are many research approaches, which use a model-based multi-device user interface generation approach. The approach builds a unified abstract user interface model, and maps it to different devices, and forms the final user interface. The model-based multi-device user interface generation approach, compared with the traditional user interface manual development approach, maintains the consistency of the various inter-device versions and improves the efficiency of development, but the usability of generated user interface is often not high. User interface pattern which attracts much attention in the field of human-computer interaction provides a possible solution to solve usability problems, but cannot be directly applied to the process of user interface automatic generation.This dissertation presents a pattern-based multi-device interface generation approach called PB_MDUIG. This approach is in the basis of original model-based multi-device user interface generation approach, introducing the user interface pattern and retains the advantage of the original approach, which makes the generated user interface can meet the usability requirements of different devices. This approach embodies three features:Firstly, the introduction of the virtual device, giving an abstract description to the user interface pattern from a functional point of view, thus we will get an abstract description based on virtual device, which not only unifies the way of description of the user interface pattern, and to some extent, improves the efficiency of interface development and makes the user interface pattern can be applied directly to the interface development process; Secondly, the user interface pattern is introduced into the model-based multi-device user interface generation approach, which not only improves the efficiency of the interface development, but also improves the usability of the interface. Thirdly, from the abstract to the concrete mapping process, adding the specific device information, so that the generated interface can be adapted to the corresponding device. In order to further verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the approach, this paper designs and implements an interactive mobile learning assistant system.