A Framework for Incorporating Usability into Model Transformations

The usability of user interfaces is crucial for the success of an application. Model driven user interface (UI) development speeds up the production of UIs and improves the maintainability of UIs. However, the usability evaluation of UIs is usually conducted by end-users or experts after UIs are generated. Such a user centric evaluation is usually time consuming and expensive, especially when the usability problems are detected in the last phase of the software development. In this paper, we propose a framework that incorporates the usability evaluation as an integral part of automatic processes for UI generation. To link the usability goal into the UI generation process, we model the usability using a goal graph for each intermediate UI model and associate the usability goals to the attributes of the models. Our proposed framework detects and addresses usability problems in the early phase of the software development.