Model-based self-explanatory UIs for free, but are they valuable?

Abstract

Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) has been extensively used for generating User Interfaces (UIs) from models. As long as these models are kept alive at runtime, the UIs are capable of adapting to variations of the context of use. This paper investigates a potentially powerful side effect: the possibility of enriching the UIs with explanations directly generated from these models. This paper first describes a software infrastructure that supports this generation of explanations. It then reports on a user study that evaluates the added value of such model based self-explanations. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.