At the Cross-Roads between Human-Computer Interaction and Model Driven Engineering

Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) engineering was oriented during its infancy towards the use of models in order to formulate its inherent knowledge. The formulation and exploitation of this know-how was then rapidly explored, through the use of automatic User Interface (UI) generation tools, in order to reduce its development costs. However, because of the disappointing quality of the resulting UI’s this approach was quickly abandoned. Nowadays, these same models are being rediscovered under the umbrella of Model Driven Engineering (MDE), to tackle the requirements driven by dynamic environments inherent to ubiquitous computing or cloud computing application domains for example. The present paper recalls the key points of the interaction between HCI engineering and MDE, and reveals the compelling potential of combining the research efforts of the two communities