The Beautification Process in Model-Driven Engineering of User Interfaces

The beautification of a user interface resulting from model-to-model and model-to-code transformations in Model-Driven Architecture consists of performing manual changes to address user requirements which have not been supported during the transformations. These requirements may include customization, users’ preferences, and compliance with corporate style guidelines. This paper introduces a beautification process into a user-interface model. This process includes a series of beautification operations based on a formal definition, as well as a constrained editor that enables designers to apply these beautification operations on a user interface. All manual changes done using these beautification operations are transformed into model-to-model transformations, thus reducing the problem of round-trip engineering. The paper also demonstrates that this process significantly reduces the number of manual changes performed on user interfaces of information systems, while preserving the quality properties induced by the transformations.