User Interface Modeling in UMLi

2000

The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a natural candidate for user interface (UI) modelling since it is the standard notation for object oriented modelling of applications. However, it is by no means clear how to model UIs using UML. This paper presents a user interface modelling case study using UML. This case study identifies some aspects of UIs that cannot be modelled using UML notation, and a set of UML constructors that may be used to model UIs. The modelling problems indicate some weaknesses of UML for modelling UIs, while the constructors exploited indicate some strengths. The identification of such strengths and weaknesses can be used in the formulation of a strategy for extending UML to provide greater support for user interface design.

ICSE Workshop on SE-HCI, 2003

«UML» 2000—The Unified Modeling …, 2000

2004

Existing software modeling tools are widely recognized to be hard to use and, hence, to adopt. We believe those usability problems are related to a legacy of formalism-centric tools that don’t promote the new challenges of modern software development. In this short paper, we briefly describe a new tool, under development, that tries to promote usability in modeling tools to support collaborative development of interactive software. It focuses on usable, real-world languages and a developer-centered design.

2002

2005

A well-designed user interface, nowadays exclusively graphical, is one of the key factors determining the application's appeal to the user. GUI modeling should be a part of the overall process of application system development.

This paper discusses different UIs design approaches. We describe how to design user interfaces, based on a MDD approach, by applying the XIS language. XIS is a coherent UML profile focused on model interactive systems. XIS integrates best practices and principles of the MDA/MDD paradigm to improve the UI design, such as separation of concerns, model-to-model and model-to-code transformations. In that way, we discuss some issues regarding the transformation processes, from XIS-based models into software systems artifacts.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2000

The UML suggests the employment of use cases for capturing the requirements and for specifying the interaction between the users and the system being modeled. Use cases are easily understood by users since they are essentially textual descriptions, but lack the precision and the conciseness accomplished by the other diagrammatic tools of UML. Besides, there is no systematic method that helps the designer to obtain such UML diagrams from a set of use cases. In this paper we present a diagrammatic tool to represent the users/system interaction called User Interaction Diagram (UID). UIDs have proven to be a valuable tool to gather requirements since they describe the exchange of information between the system and the user in a high level of abstraction, without considering specific user interface aspects and design details as in other UML diagrams. We show how UIDs can be incorporated into the requirements and analysis workflows of the Unified Process for software development.

Automated Software Engineering, 2006

User interface (UI) prototyping and scenario engineering have become popular techniques. Yet, the transition from scenario to formal specifications and the generation of UI code is still ill-defined and essentially a manual task, and the two techniques lack integration in the overall requirements engineering process. In this paper, we suggest an approach for requirements engineering that generates a user interface prototype from scenarios and yields a formal specification of the application. Scenarios are acquired in the form of collaboration diagrams as defined by the Unified Modeling Language (UML), and are enriched with user interface (UI) information. These diagrams are automatically transformed into UML Statechart specifications of the UI objects involved. From the set of obtained specifications, a UI prototype is generated that is embedded in a UI builder environment for further refinement. Based on end user feedback, the collaboration diagrams and the UI prototype may be iteratively refined, and the result of the overall process is a specification consisting of the Statechart diagrams of all the objects involved, together with the generated and refined prototype of the UI. The algorithms underlying this process have been implemented and exercised on a number of examples.