Vivian Genaro Motti

A computational framework for context-aware adaptation of user interfaces

In order to address challenges posed by different users conducting their interactive tasks on heterogeneous platforms and devices in various environments, this paper provides a computational framework to support the adaptation of the user interface of interactive systems. This framework consists of: a meta-model for understanding fundamental concepts required by adaptation, a reference framework for characterizing seven dimensions for conducting adaptation based on the meta-model, and a design space for consistently assessing the adaptation coverage. In this way, development phases are considered with a standard approach, a unified terminology, and an extensive catalog of techniques.

Showing user interface adaptivity by animated transitions

In order to reduce the inevitable end user disruption and cognitive perturbation induced by adapting a graphical user interface, the results of the adaptation could be conveyed to the end user by animating a transition scenario showing the evolution from the user interface before adaptation to the user interface after adaptation. A transition scenario consists of a sequence of adaptation operations (e.g., set/change a property of a widget, replace a widget by another, resize a widget) belonging to a catalogue of operations defined as an Extended Backus-Naur Form grammar. Each transition operation has a range from a single widget (e.g., this Ok button) to a selection of widgets based on a selector mechanism (e.g., all validation widgets of this family of interfaces). A transition scenario is built either automatically by any adaptation algorithm or interactively by a specific editor for designers. An animator then executes the animation scenario by parsing each adaptation operation one by one or in a grouped mode and by rendering them by an animated transition on a user interface model. The type (e.g., wipe, box in, box out) and parameters (e.g., animation speed, pace, direction) of each animated transition have been selected based on usability guidelines for animation. A user study suggests that a transition scenario reinforces understandability and trust, while still suffering from lag.

Simplifying the development of cross-platform web user interfaces by collaborative model-based design

Ensuring responsive design of web applications requires their user interfaces to be able to adapt according to different contexts of use, which subsume the end users, the devices and platforms used to carry out the interactive tasks, and also the environment in which they occur. To address the challenges posed by responsive design, aiming to simplify their development by factoring out the common parts from the specific ones, this paper presents Quill, a web-based development environment that enables various stakeholders of a web application to collaboratively adopt a model-based design of the user interface for cross-platform deployment. The paper establishes a series of requirements for collaborative model-based design of cross-platform web user interfaces motivated by the literature, observational and situational design. It then elaborates on potential solutions that satisfy these requirements and explains the solution selected for Quill. A user survey has been conducted to determine how stakeholders appreciate model-based design user interface and how they estimate the importance of the requirements that lead to Quill.

A computational framework for multi-dimensional context-aware adaptation

Most interactive applications often assume a pre-defined context of use of an able-bodied user, a desktop platform, in a stable environment. In contrast, users compose a heterogeneous group, interacting via different means and devices in varied environments; which requires, thus, context-aware adaptation. Adaptation has been largely investigated, but the studies are often constrained to one context dimension at a time: user or platform or environment. To address this issue and to bridge the gap between high-level adaptation goals and implementation of adaptation, this research aims at developing a computational framework for user interface adaptation based on distinct dimensions and contexts of use. This framework consists of four main contributions: a design space to characterize context-aware adaptation of user interface, a reference framework to classify adaptation techniques for distinct scenarios, an ontology of adaptation techniques based on a 3-level Adaptation Rules, and an interpreter of adaptation rules to address techniques defined in the design space and reference framework.

Assessing lag perception in electronic sketching

Electronic sketching has received a recurrence of interest over the years and again nowadays within the mobile web context, where there are diverse devices, operating systems and browsers to be considered. Multi-platform (e.g. web-based) sketching systems can be constructed to allow users to sketch on their device of preference. However, web applications do not always perform equally on all devices, and this is a critical issue, especially for applications that require instant visual feedback such as sketch-based systems. This paper describes a user study conducted to identify the most appropriate response rates (expressed in frames per second) for end users while sketching. The results are expected to guide stakeholders in defining response parameters for sketching applications on the web by showing intervals that are accepted, tolerated, and rejected by end users.

Animated transitions between user interface views

User interface development life cycle often involve several different views of the user interface over time either at the same level of abstraction or at different levels of abstraction. The relationship between these different views is often supported by tiling coordinated windows containing these related views simultaneously, thus leaving the developer with the responsibility to effectively and efficiently link the corresponding elements of these different views. This paper attempts to overcome the shortcomings posed by the coordinated visualization of multiple views by providing UsiView, a user interface rendering engine in which one single window ensures an animated transition between these different user interface views dynamically an internal view, an external view, and a conceptual view. Examples include the following cases: an authoring environment ensures an animated transition between an internal view (e.g., HTML5) and its external view (e. g., a web page), an Integrated Development Environment ensures an animated transition between its conceptual view and its external view; a model-driven engineering environment ensures an animated transition between the conceptual view at different levels of abstraction, e.g., from task to abstract user interface to concrete user interface until final user interface. The paper discusses the potential advantages of using animated transitions between user interface views during the development life cycle.

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 developers 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.

Multi-dimensional context-aware adaptation for web applications

This tutorial presents the state-of-the-art of adaptation for web interfaces concerning multi-dimensionality and context-awareness. The specific goals include the presentation of: (i) fundamental concepts, as motivations, definitions and relevant context information; (ii) adaptation techniques for web applications, as methods, models, strategies and technologies; (iii) adaptable and adaptive web applications in scientific and commercial aspects.

Enhancing collaborative sketching activities with context-aware adaptation guidelines

Designing interactive systems for multiple contexts of use becomes a burden when the end user interaction takes place in distinct scenarios whose specific characteristics and constraints vary and must be carefully considered. Stakeholders face then two main challenges: they are not aware of what among several context information is significantly relevant to consider, or how to appropriately adapt the user interfaces according to the information considered. Furthermore, stakeholders cannot simply rely on existing UI editors once they usually do not provide enough support for adaptation. Thus, adaptation is often ignored, resulting in user interfaces that are only suitable for static and conventional contexts of use. To support the design of user interfaces that are properly adapted to their target context, this paper proposes a novel methodology to enhance sketching activities by proposing to the end user context-aware adaptation guidelines. This work aims at raising awareness about context-aware adaptation since the early stages of the UI design.

Context-aware adaptation of user interfaces

Context-aware Adaptation (CAA) of user interfaces involves the identification of the relevant context information that surrounds the user during her interaction in order to properly adapt elements of an interactive system aiming at enhancing the end user interaction. The main goals of CAA are improving the usability levels of the system by using the relevant information of the user context to properly transform a system.In this special issue the authors are presenting various model-based approaches to user interface design and evaluation aiming to support the context aware adaptation.