A User Study to Evaluate the Customization of Automatically Generated GUIs

Graphical User Interface (GUI) development is time-consuming and error-prone. Hence, automated GUI generation from higher-level interaction design models may become more and more important. In particular, automated generation can help with interface design prototyping. The usability of fully-automatically generated GUIs is considered unsatisfactory, however. Manual changes to the generated GUI itself would need to be made persistent. Hence, we proposed customization rules on a higher level of abstraction, and changes of style sheets. This paper presents a new user study on whether this kind of customization can actually improve generated GUIs. This study achieved statistically significant results that the adjusted task time of the customized version is less than that of the fully-automatically generated one. The subjective results indicated that attractiveness and wording were improved through customization.