Silvia Berti

TERESA: a transformation-based environment for designing and developing multi-device interfaces

The ever-increasing availability of new types of devices raises a number of issues for user interface designers and interactive software developers. We have designed and developed a model-based authoring environment (TERESA), which provides support when designing and developing interfaces accessible through various device types in Web-based environment.

Migratory MultiModal interfaces in MultiDevice environments

This paper describes an environment able to support migratory multimodal interfaces in multidevice environments. We introduce the software architecture and the device-independent languages used by our tool, which provides services enabling users to freely move about, change device and continue the current task from the point where they left off in the previous device. Our environment currently supports interaction with applications through graphical and vocal modalities, either separately or together. Such applications are implemented in Web-based languages. We discuss how the features of the device at hand, desktop or mobile, are considered when generating the multimodal user interface.

A taxonomy for migratory user interfaces

Migratory user interfaces are particularly promising for forthcoming ubiquitous environments enabled by the evolution of wireless technology and the proliferation of a wide variety of interactive devices. In this paper we present a logical framework and some fundamental concepts and dimensions that can be useful to help user interface designers and developers understand migratory interfaces, analyse the state of the art, and identify areas which need further research. A number of works in this area are compared and referred to such framework and dimensions, so as to identify the advantages and drawbacks of the various approaches.

Natural development of ubiquitous interfaces

A goal of natural development is to ease the building of interactive software systems. Some work has been dedicated to obtaining natural programming [3], which aims to support programming through languages understandable by people without any specific programming skills. On one hand, natural development implies that people should be able to work through familiar and instantly understandable representations that allow them to easily express relevant concepts, and thereby create or modify applications. On the other hand, since a software artifact must be precisely specified in order to be implemented, there will still be the need for environments supporting transformations from intuitive and familiar representations into precise---but more difficult to develop---descriptions.

Mixed-initiative, trans-modal interface migration

This paper presents our solution to supporting runtime migration of Web application interfaces among devices offering different interaction modalities, in particular graphic to vocal platform migration and vice versa. Migrating between platforms implies keeping track of the user interactions in order to retrieve the runtime state of the interface and maintaining interaction continuity on the target device. The system can serve user-issued migration requests containing the identifier of the selected target device, and can also automatically start the migration procedure when environment conditions require it. In automatic migration the target platform has to be automatically selected as well. To this aim, we consider devices belonging to a restricted environment and have defined selection rules in order to identify the most suitable available target for the ongoing migration.

A transformation-based environment for designing multi-device interactive applications

The ever-increasing availability of new types of devices raises a number of issues for user interface designers and interactive software developers. We have designed and developed a tool (TERESA), which can be helpful when designing applications accessible through various device types.

Model-Based Design of Speech Interfaces

The increasing availability of various types of interactive platforms has raised the need for design environments able to support development of user interfaces that exploit interaction modalities other than the traditional graphical interfaces. In this paper we present a model-based solution to help designers in the development of voice applications. In particular, we focus on how to derive a speech interface implemented in VoiceXML from an abstract user interface description.

Development of multi-modal interfaces in multi-device environments

Recent technological evolution has enabled environments accessible through a wide variety of interactive devices. Such devices can differ also in terms of interaction modality. In this paper we show how it is possible to generate multi-modal interfaces for different platforms starting with logical user interface descriptions. This approach simplifies the development of applications that can be accessed through a variety of interactive devices and modalities.

Analysing trans-modal interface migration

While new solutions for supporting migratory interfaces are emerging, there is still a lack of analysis of their impact on users. In this paper we discuss the design of a solution for trans-modal migratory interfaces in multi-device and results obtained testing it with users. We conducted a study aimed at evaluating the user impact of a migration service applied to platforms supporting different interaction modalities (graphic vs. vocal) in Web environments.