UI-GEAR: User Interface Generation prEview capable to Adapt in Real-time

User Interface (UI) preview enables UI developers to preview and see the current User Interface before being generated. Despite the many advantages that UI preview could offer, it is not provided by current UI development environments. This paper presents UI-GEAR, a UI generation preview capable to adapt in real-time. UI-GEAR is developed within the MERODE method, a model-driven engineering approach capable to generate a fully functional system prototype from its specification in models. UI-GEAR extends MERODE with a UI development environment that enables developers to play with generation options and to straightforwardly and in real-time visualize the consequences of their choices on the UI to be generated, thus providing them with immediate guidance and design flexibility. We have carried out an experiment with developers with novel experience on designing UIs that demonstrates the advantages of this approach.

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