Generating Abstact User Interfaces from an Informal Design
Adrien Coyette, Stéphane Faulkner, Jean M. Vanderdonckt · Digital Access to Libraries (Université catholique de Louvain (UCL), l'Université de Namur (UNamur) and the Université Saint-Louis (USL-B)) · 2005
Sketching activities are widely adopted during early design phases of user interface development to convey informal specifications of the interface presentation and dialog. Designers or even end users can sketch parts or whole of the future interface they want. With the ever increasing availability of different computing platforms, a need arises to continuously support sketching across these platforms having various programming languages, interface development environments and operating systems. To address the needs along these dimensions that pose new challenges to user interface sketching tools, SketchiXML is a multi-platform multi-agent interactive application enabling designers and end users to sketch user interfaces with different levels of details and support for different contexts of use. The results of the sketching are then analyzed to produce interface specifications independently of any context, including user and platform. These specifications are exploited to progressively produce one or many interfaces, for one or many users, platforms, and environments.