Taxonomies in DUI Design Patterns: A Systematic Approach for Removing Overlaps Among Design Patterns and Creating a Clear Hierarchy

Recently a library of design patterns for designing distributed user interfaces (DUIs) was created to help researchers and designers to create user interfaces and to provide an overview of solutions to common DUIs design problems without requiring a significant amount of time to be spent on reading domain-specific literature and exploring existing DUIs implementations. The current version of the DUI design patterns library need to be assessed because a lot of design patterns are overlapping each other and their relationships are not clear enough to effectively find the most relevant design pattern for solving particular design problem, so the purpose of this thesis is to mature the DUI design patterns knowledge field by removing the duplicate design patterns, their description and to create a taxonomy where each design pattern should be organised in a way that will reduce redundancy, possibly leading to grouping or eventually merging similar patterns and allow to navigate to related patterns. To achieve the defined goals, the first target was to investigate the possible overlaps among design patterns and their relevancy with each other, in order to get these insights natural language processing tool was built for extracting and analysing each design pattern research paper to find potential codes. Later in this study thematic analysis was done with domain experts to get themes, their description and higher level categories from generated codes to organize all related design patterns in a clear hierarchy. The outcomes of this thesis included the clarification of the relationships among design patterns by creating a taxonomy, clarified the description of individual design pattern, overlaps and duplicate design patterns were removed and merged similar design patterns.