A Consistency Tool for User Interface Development

Ensuring User Interface consistency is extremely difficult---manual review and developer coordination is required to achieve uniform interaction metaphors across operating systems, web browsers, applications, and disparate devices. This is complicated by the capabilities of various UI toolkits and specific devices, as well as the development choices of the application programmers. We propose a workflow that uses a Domain-Specific Language (termed the Semantic User Interface Markup, or SUIM) to represent user interface guidelines to produce executable code. This DSL is a wide-spectrum language: it can serve as a non-executable specification language for capturing the generic constraints of User Interface Guidelines; and yet it is also able to specify detailed screen descriptions and user interactions which can be directly translated into code. Portions of the user interfaces that are not defined by a 'specification' can be either refined by the DSL (by further additions to the specification) or left open, to be implemented by user code. Our design provides organizations with the ability to specify and distribute UI guidelines that can be integrated directly into the application development workflow, providing an unprecedented level of application consistency without restricting the programmer's development environment.