Automatic Feedback Generation for Supporting User Interface Design

Although the interest for User Interfaces (UI) has increased their study, their design is a difficult process to learn. Novel UI designers, therefore, need guidance through the learning process of UI design to obtain better results. Feedback is a key factor to improve knowledge and skills acquisition. However, providing individual feedback is a complex and time-consuming task and requires a fair amount of expertise. This paper describes a solution to this problem: Feedback ENriched user Interface Simulation (FENIkS). FENIkS is a model-driven engineering UI design simulation tool able to automatically provide instant feedback to the students about how they apply UI design principles. While designing the UI, the novice designer receives feedback on how design principles are applied through the options he/she selects. Then, when generating a working prototype from the models, feedback explaining the application of principles is incorporated in the prototype. An experimental evaluation was conducted, demonstrating FENIkS improves students' understanding of UI design principles. The perceived usability was also positively evaluated. This paper explains FENIkS' design: the meta-model, how design options, design principles and types of feedback are used to generate automated feedback on the observation of design principles in the tool and the generated prototype.