Model based self-explanatory user interfaces
In Ingénierie des Systèmes d'Information 22(4). pages 129-157. 2017.
Alfonso García Frey, Sophie Dupuy-Chessa, Gaëlle Calvary
Elena Kornyshova, Marco Winckler (Eds.)
Abstract
UserinterfacesplayanimportantroleinInformationSystems,particularlyfortheir acceptance. But in Human Computer Interaction, perfect quality is an utopia. Despite all the design efforts, there are always situations the user interface is not suitable for: this claims for quality reparation. This paper explores self-explanatory user interfaces, i.e. user interfaces capable of “rephrasing” themselves so that to make them understandable by the user. The approach follows the principles of model-driven engineering. It consists of keeping design de- cisions contained in models alive at runtime so that to dynamically enrich the user interface by augmenting it with a set of possible questions and answers. Based on a problem space, this article details how to support self-explanation for free thanks to models. It also proposes a soft- ware infrastructure UsiExplain based on the UsiXML meta-models. An evaluation is conducted on a case study related to a car shopping website. It confirms that the approach is relevant especially for usage questions.