Management of interface design knowledge with MOBI-D

Effective guidelines for interface construction require developers to apply a user-centered approach in their designs. Yet, developers lack integrated tools that would allow them to work with high-level concepts, such as user tasks, and to relate them to lower level elements, such as widgets, in their interface designs. The Model-Based Interface Designer (MOBI-D) is a suite of tools for the management, visualization, editing, and interactive refinement of interface-design knowledge at multiple levels of abstraction. MOBI-D represents knowledge via declarative interface models that assign specific knowledge roles to each model component. Developers work in an integrated environment with abstract concepts such as user tasks, domain objects, presentation styles, dialogs, and user types while being able to relate those concepts to concrete interface elements such as push buttons. MOBI-D is the first development environment to integrate the disparate elements of interface design into structured conceptual units—interface models—and to define an interface design as an explicit declarative element of such units.