Representing User-Interface Patterns in UML

Software patterns played a major role in object-oriented development, enabling and promoting reuse at higher levels of abstraction. Patterns provided an excellent way to increase the productivity and control in object-oriented information systems’ development. The user-interface is well known to be responsible for a considerable part of the development effort in interactive systems. Yet, we still lack a standard, or at least commonly accepted, notation to express technical representations of UI patterns that convey the solution in an abstract way that can be applied in many different design situations. In this paper we argue that one of the problems preventing the identification and dissemination of UI patterns is the lack of such a modeling notation. We discuss this problem and present an approach based on set of UML extensions specifically adapted for UI design.