Quill: a collaborative design assistant for cross platform web application user interfaces

Web application development teams face an increasing burden when they need to come up with a consistent user interface across different platforms with different characteristics, for example, desktop, smart phone and tablet devices. This is going to get even worse with the adoption of HTML5 on TVs and cars. This short paper describes a browser-based collaborative design assistant that does the drudge work of ensuring that the user interfaces are kept in sync across all of the target platforms and with changes to the domain data and task models. This is based upon an expert system that dynamically updates the user interface design to reflect the developer's decisions. This is implemented in terms of constraint propagation and search through the design space. An additional benefit is the ease of providing accessible user interfaces in conjunction with assistive technologies.