Belidor: A Specification Language for Operationalizing Structural Analogies Between User Interfaces

We present Belidor, a text notation that describes the structure underlying user interfaces (UIs). Belidor’s relational model emphasizes how structures, such as the temporal order of text messages, cut across an interactive system’s conceptual model, user-facing presentation, and interactive behavior. We demonstrate Belidor’s expressive power with a gallery of examples spanning GUIs (eg. messaging, video editors), screen readers, and hardware devices. Belidor serves as an effective representation for structural analogies between user interfaces (eg. between calendars and video-editors). In contrast, prior work relied on visual UI representations and therefore prioritized visual style transfer. In three case studies, we show how Belidor can reveal analogies, help transfer ideas between user interfaces, and describe design patterns as analogies We discuss the implications of representing the structure of interactive systems for designers and developers, and envision how Belidor might support “structural design moves” for interface designers.