Revista Romana de Interactiune Om-Calculator

193-194

Authors: Jean Vanderdonckt

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.

211-248

Authors: Vivian Genaro Motti, Jean Vanderdonckt

The variety of contexts of use in which the interaction takes place nowadays is a challenge for both stakeholders for the development and end users for the interaction. Stakeholders either ignore the exponential amount of information coming from the context of use, adopting the inaccessible approach of one-size-fits-all, or they must dedicate a significant effort to carefully consider context differences while designing several different versions of the same user interface. For end users, web pages that are not adapted become often inaccessible in non-conventional contexts of use, with mobile devices, as smart phones and tablet PCs. In order to leverage such efforts, we propose in this paper a meta-model that by means of a unified view supports all phases of the implementation of context-aware adaptation for user interfaces. With such a formal abstraction of an interactive system, stakeholders can generate different instantiations with more concrete UI’s that can properly handle and adapt accordingly to the different constraints and characteristics of different contexts of use. We present CAMM, a meta-model for context-aware adaptation covering different application domains and also a complete adaptation lifecycle. Moreover we also present various instantiations of such a model for different scenarios of a car rental example.

269-289

Authors: Eric Ceret, Alfonso García Frey, Sophie Dupuy-Chessa, Gaëlle Calvary

Modern User Interfaces need to dynamically adapt to their context of use, i.e. mainly to the changes that occur in the environment or in the platform. Model-Driven Engineering offers powerful solutions to handle the design and the implementation of such User Interfaces. However, this approach requires the creation of an important amount of models and transformations, each of them in turn requiring specific knowledge and competencies. This leads to the need of adapted process models and tools sustaining the designers’ work. Moreover, automatic adaptation to new devices implies that users could have questions about the interaction with the same UI in such new devices. As this adaption is automatically performed at runtime, designers cannot foresee all the possible combinations of contexts of use at design time in order to conveniently support the users. For this reason, dynamic help systems are necessary to generate dynamic explanations to the end-user at runtime. This paper presents (1) a new vision of process model flexibility that makes it possible to adapt the process model to the designer's knowledge and know-how, (2) the "flexibilization" of the UsiXML methodology, (3) the principles supporting self-explanatory UIs and (4) the integration of all these notions in UsiComp, an integrated and open framework for designing and executing plastic User Interfaces. UsiComp relies on a service-based architecture. It offers two modules, for design and execution. The implementation has been made using OSGi services offering dynamic possibilities for using and extending the tool. This paper describes the architecture and shows the extension capacities of the framework through two running examples.