Symbol-relation grammars: a formalism for graphical languages
Information and Computation
Application of graph transformation to visual languages
Handbook of graph grammars and computing by graph transformation
Specification and dialogue control of visual interaction through visual rewriting systems
ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS)
Generating graphical applications from state-transition visual specifications
International Journal of Human-Computer Studies
ASE '97 Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Automated software engineering (formerly: KBSE)
A System for Rapid Prototyping of Visual Language Environments
HCC '01 Proceedings of the IEEE 2001 Symposia on Human Centric Computing Languages and Environments (HCC'01)
Diagram Editing with Hypergraph Parser Support
VL '97 Proceedings of the 1997 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages (VL '97)
VL '00 Proceedings of the 2000 IEEE International Symposium on Visual Languages (VL'00)
Modeling visual interactive systems through dynamic visual languages
IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part A: Systems and Humans
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The development of interactive visual applications is a complex work, usually performed with the help of advanced visual programming environments. Although a number of tools are available to support designers and developers in the specification of a GUI's layout and behavior, and in the generation of the corresponding code that implements the interface, theoretical guidelines and/or semi-automatic mechanisms rely upon the knowledge of the designer to manage usability and accessibility issues. Indeed, the evaluation of the visual environments is traditionally performed by means of expert-based evaluations or by testing with end users. In this work we describe a methodology to specify and evaluate interactive visual environments, in particular web interfaces, based on the SR-Action Grammars formalism and we present a bottom - up approach to aid the designer to develop graphical applications that automatically respect a significant number of usability rules before the software is released and tested by standard methods. We show how it is possible to assess the usability metrics of consistency, completeness and user control by means of checks performed at a high level of abstraction. VALUTA (Automatic Tool for the Usability Verification at Abstract Level) is the implemented tool that allows developers to generate the formal specification of an interactive visual application in automatic manner, so to perform the related usability controls at a very early stage. Thanks to usability controls automatically performed at formal level, the designer can use the evaluation results to perform feedback analysis of the visual environment. The tool is applicable to an already existing interface, allowing the designer to evaluate its usability in the development of a more usable version. We have analyzed the home page of three web sites (www.lycos.it, www.google.it, http://it.mail.yahoo.com/) as a case study and we show the related evaluation report generated by the described approach.