Self-Explanatory User Interfaces by Model-Driven Engineering

Modern User Interfaces (UI) must deal with the increasing complexity of applications as well as new features such as the capacity of UIs to be dynamically adapted to the con- text of use. The complexity does not necessarily imply a better quality. Thus, it becomes necessary to make users un- derstand the UIs. This paper describes an on-going research about Self-Explanatory User Interfaces (SE-UI) by Model- Driven Engineering (MDE). Self-explanation makes refer- ence to the capacity of a UI to provide the end-user with information about its rationale (which is the purpose of the UI), its design rationale (why is the UI structured into this set of workspaces?, what's the purpose of this button?), its current state (why is the menu disabled?) as well as the evo- lution of the state (how can I enable this feature?). Explana- tions are provided by embedded models. We explore model- driven engineering to understand why and how this approach can lead us to overcome shortcomings of UI quality success-fully.