An interface prototyper supporting free design components specification

Abstract

Complex components allow increasing the abstraction in a visual interface specification process, with independence of any platform or programming language to represent an user interface. In order to support this type of components a XML specification was created which allows specifying components visual appearance, composition and dialog. It provides a user interface abstraction to free design components (without any dependency of libraries of predesigned user interface components - toolkits). All information containing in the specification allows showing what will be the user interface final visual aspect, using a handmade or a computer technique (this is the objective of this paper). Using complex components, being incrementally more complex, simplifies the user interface designing and prototyping processes. In order to demonstrate the possibility to show the visual appearance of an interface and to validate the specification, a prototype to visualize any user interface specified using UIFD was created. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.