Towards end-user development of graphical user interfaces for internet of things

摘要

Graphical user interface (GUI) development is generally complicated, time-consuming, and requires programming knowledge. In the context of the internet of things, this work focuses on producing an efficient development approach that also supports non-experts. We introduce a novel "inverted" development approach that does not require program code to be written - a step towards supporting end-user development in the given context The approach is realized as a language for describing GUIs, interpreters for rendering GUIs, and a graphical tool for creating and editing GUIs. The work is evaluated in a number of research projects in the domain of e-health; we conclude that the GUI language is practically viable for building professional-grade GUIs. Furthermore, the presented editor is compared directly to a market leading product in a controlled experiment. From this, we conclude that the editor is accessible to new users, and that it can be more efficient to use than the commercial alternative.