Simplifying the development of cross-platform web user interfaces by collaborative model-based design

Ensuring responsive design of web applications requires their user interfaces to be able to adapt according to different contexts of use, which subsume the end users, the devices and platforms used to carry out the interactive tasks, and also the environment in which they occur. To address the challenges posed by responsive design, aiming to simplify their development by factoring out the common parts from the specific ones, this paper presents Quill, a web-based development environment that enables various stakeholders of a web application to collaboratively adopt a model-based design of the user interface for cross-platform deployment. The paper establishes a series of requirements for collaborative model-based design of cross-platform web user interfaces motivated by the literature, observational and situational design. It then elaborates on potential solutions that satisfy these requirements and explains the solution selected for Quill. A user survey has been conducted to determine how stakeholders appreciate model-based design user interface and how they estimate the importance of the requirements that lead to Quill.