Abstract not found

Increased interest in universal usability is causing some researchers to study advanced strategies for satisfying first-time as well as intermittent and expert users. This paper promotes the idea of multi-layer interface designs that enable first-time and novice users to begin with a limited set of features at layer 1. They can remain at layer 1, then move up to higher layers when needed or when they have time to learn further features. The arguments for and against multi-layer interfaces are presented with two example systems: a word processor with 8 layers and an interactive map with 3 layers. New research methods and directions are proposed.

Constructing multi-device interfaces still presents major challenges, despite all eorts of the industry and several academic initiatives to develop usable solutions. One approach which is nding its way into general use, is XML-based User Interface descriptions to generate suitable User Interfaces for embedded systems and mobile computing devices. Another

Mobile platforms are becoming an increasingly important alternative for accessing web pages. Many Web pages are not suited to these platforms and need to be adapted, or rewritten from scratch. Adaptation can be made in two ways: either by a dynamic conversion or by a static reengineering. VAQUITA belongs to the second category by applying a model-based approach to reverse engineer web pages at a certain level of abstraction to transfer them to other computing platforms afterwards. Instead of reverse engineering a presentation model and translating it into another model specified for a particular platform, this paper proposes a reverse engineering tailored for any target platform, even one not yet defined. The essence of this reverse engineering approach consists in composing several functions of abstraction, reflection, translation, and reification into two steps: retargeting and regenerating a web page to another platform.

In the last few years, the use of mobile computing devices has tremendously increased and expectations are that the growth of mobile computing will continue for many years to come. This evolution creates new challenges for the design of user interfaces. In order to effectively use the new technology, an application will need to be usable on different platforms, in different circumstances and by different users. Thus, the user interface of the application has to adapt to the context in which it will be used. In this paper, we will address the problem of context-aware computing and how a user interface can be adapted according to its context at runtime and still be usable. We will define the concept context of rendering in order to effectively incorporate the information provided by the context of use in the rendering of a context sensitive user interface. To achieve this, we will combine task models with abstract user interface descriptions and context dependent information. The approach that is taken will be illustrated by the discussion of a proof-of-concept implementation. 1

The construction of software systems is becoming increasingly complex because of the changing environments the software is supposed to function in. Taking into account the context of use, how the system reacts and anticipates changes in its working environment, is important for a wide range of applications, such as mobile services for example. Model-driven design is already widely accepted as a software engineering methodology to cope with these new type of requirements. This approach is known both in software engineering (e.g. model-driven architecture) as in the design of user interfaces (model-based user interface development), but although they target the same deficiencies from traditional approaches, there is still a gap between both. New modeling elements are necessary that allow the designer to make both context of use and user interactions explicit in the design phase and to create context-sensitive software that will be more robust and usable. We extend the UML 2.0 notation to address the aforementioned issues and present extensions to support the modeling of context-sensitive interactive applications. These extensions are defined in a new UML profile that can easily be used in existing modeling environments.

Model-based design of user interfaces can be a viable alternative for other user interface specifications especially in the case of multi-platform and even more so in the case of context-sensitive interactive applications. In this paper we look at several notations used in model-based design methodologies and analyze them according to requirements we determined for the notations. In order to get an overview of how well different approaches are able to support the design context-sensitive interactive applications, we determine a set of models that are relevant for this type of applications and organize them visually in such a way that the level of support for different models and the relations between them could be shown adequately. Several notations used for model-based design of user interface or interactive systems were evaluated using these criteria. The resulting information was used to determine areas where work is needed to design better notations for the involved. Author Keywords Model-based user interface design, context-sensitive

Semantic service descriptions have paved the way for flexible interaction with services in a mobile computing environment. Services can be automatically discovered, invoked and even composed. On the contrary, the user interfaces for interacting with these services are often still designed by hand. This approach poses a serious threat to the overall flexibility of the system. To make the user interface design process scale, it should be automated as much as possible. We propose to augment service descriptions with highlevel user interface models to support automatic user interface adaptation. Our method builds upon OWL-S, an ontology for Semantic Web Services, by connecting a collection of OWL-S services to a hierarchical task structure and selected presentation information. This allows end-users to interact with services on a variety of platforms.

Technology-mediated home care is attractive for older people living at home and also for their carers. It provides the information necessary to give confidence and assurance to everyone interested in the wellbeing of the older person. From a care delivery perspective, however, widespread deployment of home care technologies presents system developers with a set of challenges. These challenges arise from the issues associated with scaling from individual installations to providing a community-wide service, particularly when each installation is to be fitted to the particular but changing needs of the residents, their in-home carers and the larger healthcare community. This paper presents a home care software architecture and services that seek to address these challenges. The approach aims to generate the information needed in a timely and appropriate form to inform older residents and their carers about changing life style that may indicate a loss of well-being. It unites sensor-based services, home care policy management, resource discovery, multimodal interaction and dynamic configuration services. In this way, the approach offers the integration of a variety of home care services with adaptation to the

In this paper, we present our observations regarding modeling multimodal, context-sensitive user interfaces. Based on these observations, we argue to use the “Dialogue Refinement ” approach to conjointly describe behavior and layout of user interfaces.