IDEALXML: an Experience-Based Environment for User Interface Design

Coad said that a pattern is a template of interacting objects, one that may be used again and again by analogy [9]. Since 1997, HCI community has been working in the development of user interface patterns and pattern languages. Nevertheless, HCI community lacks a unified language for expressing patterns like software engineering has in UML yet, this lack of a unified language poses an interesting challenge for HCI research community to bring software engineering experiences in pattern-based design into user interface development. In this paper an environment, IDEALXML, is introduced to take another step forward towards pattern-based user interfaces design. These patterns are gathered by using textual descriptions and diagrams. In the proposed tool, some of the most salient for notations, available to HCI design have been integrated.