Automating UI guidelines verification by leveraging pattern based UI and model based development

• Authors: Satya Viswanathan;Johan Christiaan Peters
• Venue: CHI '10 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems
• Year: 2010

In large enterprises different teams work on different parts of a big software application. Therefore, retaining user interaction paradigms and concepts becomes important. However, during the development of a large software product, these principles and paradigms get progressively diluted, due to trade-offs, differences in interpretation, communication errors and many other reasons. In order to remain true to design rationale and communicating them to a wider audience/consumers, often User Interface (UI) Style Guide are created. The style guide attempts to sensitize and educate its consumers about design principles and document some of these design rationales for references. However, the usability, usage and adoption of these UI guidelines within an organization are topics frequently discussed and debated in several forums for years. Post the 'design and definition phase' of software development lifecycle, UI designers are often required to do 'quality checks' as the UIs get developed. Despite painstakingly defining every interaction to its finest level of granularity, in practice the guidelines are often not followed or interpreted incorrectly. The method of manually inspecting the 'implemented' user interface for compliance to UI guidelines has the following pitfalls: Highly effort and time consuming; Outcome is often inaccurate, unreliable and sub-optimal in quality; Findings are too late in the process to be fixed.; Not an efficient process for tracking issues to resolution This case study talks about the challenges we faced with our UI Style guide and how we tackled them. Based on internal user research and design thinking we defined an approach of better integrating UI style guide into the software design and development process. We leveraged the benefits of pattern based UI approach and a model based development environment to achieve compliance to our UI guidelines by: Providing tools to automate verification of UI guidelines in the model based development environment; Redefining the development process to support UI verification early-on during the design and development process