The YUIO Language: Supporting Evaluation and Implementation of Virtual Windows

The Virtual Windows method is a systematic approach to the design of user interfaces to information systems that support users' tasks efficiently. This paper introduces Yuio, a complementary declarative user interface description language (UIDL) that allows a formal specification of virtual windows, and of their behavior during interaction with the user. We find that Yuio is well suited to express the essential design choices made during design and implementation of user interfaces based on the approach, and that it provides a gentle slope of complexity when refining designs.
Our work includes a tool that makes it possible to quickly evaluate virtual windows designs in practice by creating a virtual prototype. Among future work is a designer-guided transformation of a virtual prototype to a final system taking into account characteristics of a target platform.