Natural Development of Nomadic Interfaces Based on Conceptual Descriptions

Natural development aims to ease the development process of interactive software systems. This can be obtained through the use of familiar representations together with intelligent environments able to map them onto corresponding implementations of interactive systems. The main motivation for model-based approaches to user interface design has been to support development through the use of meaningful abstractions in order to avoid dealing with low-level details. Despite this potential benefit, their adoption has mainly been limited to professional designers. This paper shows how they should be extended in order to achieve natural development through environments that enable end-users to create or modify interactive applications still using conceptual models, but with continuous support that facilitates their development, analysis, and use. In particular, we discuss the application of the proposed criteria to the CTTE and TERESA environments, which support the design and development of multi-device interfaces.