Web User Interface Design of a Visual Editor for Cloud Infrastructure Modeling

Abstract

Cloud computing has evolved the way IT technicians manage infrastructure resources to support software applications. Leasing equipment and services from cloud infrastructure providers, such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, etc., has replaced the traditional strategy of locally installing expensive equipment. Nowadays, IT technicians model the infrastructure they need by writing scripts, then running these scripts in the provider web platform. However, writing scripts becomes a complex task that involves interacting with the Command Line Interface and knowing the commands each provider imposes. In this context, replacing textual with visual interaction becomes a need. The purpose is to fesign the user interface (UI) of a visual web editor to model the cloud infrastructure resources. The User-Centered Design (UCD) methodology was applied to design the UI. As part of DCU, a study of the UIs of diagramming online tools was conducted to identify UI design patterns; those that expert designers use when designing visual editors.The results show that a set of 11 UI patterns for designing visual editor UIs was defined. In addition, a pattern language was built considering the relationships between patterns. By using the pattern language, the visual editor UI design was composed. As conclusions, the pattern language provided a logical way to compose the visual editor UI. In this sense, the proposed UI together with the pattern language can become a reference point for designing UIs in this domain. In future work, the effectiveness of the UI in reducing the complexity of defining the cloud infrastructure will be evaluated with user tests.