QualIHM

Objectives

An effective User Interface (UI) is a key success factor for interactive systems. Hence, particular attention should be paid to the UI design during the Requirement Engineering (RE) process. In this context, the QualIHM project aims to develop a LGPL3 and multi-platform toolkit for efficient UI Design. The toolkit deals with the limitations of the existing RE tools by supporting the description of requirements in different formats. In addition, QualIHM facilitates the UI design by transforming requirement formats from one to another, generating the UI code and providing feedback about the consistency and usability and of the UI.

Results

The intensive collaboration of CETIC, LILAB and Defimedia, as industrial sponsor of the project, led to the development of the first version of the QualIHM toolkit. This version integrates several modules that enable:

• The description of requirements in different formats to ensure the completeness of UI requirements;
• The management of the traceability between these different requirements formats to strengthen the consistency of UI requirements;
• The evaluation of the quality of UIs by providing feedback regarding their aesthetics.

A demonstration video of the QualiHM solution is available online

Added value

The QualIHM toolkit ensures the completeness and consistency of UI requirements as well as the quality of the UI. It answers a need the majority of ICT enterprises faces, helping them to improve the quality of their requirements specifications and the resulting UIs. This project will have a significant impact as the User Interface is the most visible part of an application the end user faces.

The resulting tool, with its LGPL3 license, will help ICT enterprises to increase their competitiveness, and potentially avoid unnecessary complex combinations of non-interoperable tools.