Multiplatform application user interface design based on spreadsheet

Abstract

User interface plays an important role in an application: it is what users directly see and feel. It is also what programmers spend much time on. Therefore, many tools to ease the user interface development are available. Many of them are part of integrated development environment (IDE) of programming languages. Some of them are more generic and available for a few user interface toolkits or programming languages. However, these tools usually assume their users are targeting specific platform: desktop, web, or mobile application. While generic tools are sometimes generous enough, they usually cannot make it totally independent of underlying toolkit or programming languages. Modeling tools exist, but it means learning something new. This is one of the backgrounds for what we propose in this paper. An application user interface model based on spreadsheet: software packages that have been around for almost four decades. We emphasize multiplatform output: design once and output in several platforms (we provide two: desktop and web; adaptable to more). We do not assume a specific toolkit or programming language, but we still care about styles. Our experiments prove this method is usable and results in quicker user interface prototyping—even for professional programmers—with development time comparison ranging from 26.7% (best) to 80%.