Natural Development of Ubiquitous Interfaces

Natural development aims to ease the development process of interactive software systems. Some work has been dedicated to obtain natural programming (Pane and Myers, 1996), which aims to support programming through languages that are understandable by people who have not programming experience. However, there is a need for a more comprehensive view of the development cycle, thus not limited only to programming, but also including requirements, designing, modifying, tailoring, ….. Natural development implies that people should be able to work through familiar and immediately understandable representations that allow them to easily express and manipulate relevant concepts, and thereby create or modify interactive software artefacts. On the other hand, since a software artefact needs to be precisely specified in order to be implemented, there will still be the need for environments supporting transformations from intuitive and familiar representations into more precise, but more difficult to develop, descriptions. The main motivation for model-based approaches to user interface design has been to support development through the use of meaningful abstractions in order to avoid dealing with low-level details. Despite this potential benefit, their adoption has mainly been limited to professional designers. New solutions are emerging that are able to extend such approaches in order to achiev