Automatic, look-and-feel independent dialog creation for graphical user interfaces

Jade is a new interactive tool that automatically creates graphical input dialogs such as dialog boxes and menus. Application programmers write a textual specification of a dialog’s contents. This specification contains absolutely no graphical information and thus is look-and-feel inde-pendent. The graphic artist uses a direct manipulation graphical editor to define the rules, graphical objects, in-teraction techniques, and decorations that will govern the dialog’s look-and-feel, and stores the results in a look and feel database. Jade combines the application programmer’s specification with the look-and-feel database to automatically generate a graphical dialog. If necessary, the graphic artist can then edit the resulting dialog using a graphical editor and these edits will be remembered by Jade, even if the original textual specification is modified. By eliminating all graphical references from the dialog’s content specification, Jade requires only the absolutely minimum specification from the application programmer. This also allows a dialog box or menu’s look and feel to be rapidly and effortlessly changed by simply switching look and feel databases. Finally, Jade permits complex inter-field relationships to be specified in a simple manner

Adaptive model-driven user interface development systems

Adaptive user interfaces (UIs) were introduced to address some of the usability problems that plague many software applications. Model-driven engineering formed the basis for most of the systems targeting the development of such UIs. An overview of these systems is presented and a set of criteria is established to evaluate the strengths and shortcomings of the state-of-the-art, which is categorized under architectures, techniques, and tools. A summary of the evaluation is presented in tables that visually illustrate the fulfillment of each criterion by each system. The evaluation identified several gaps in the existing art and highlighted the areas of promising improvement

Automatically Generating Personalized User Interfaces with SUPPLE

Today's computer–human interfaces are typically designed with the assumption that they are going to be used by an able-bodied person, who is using a typical set of input and output devices, who has typical perceptual and cognitive abilities, and who is sitting in a stable, warm environment. Any deviation from these assumptions may drastically hamper the person's effectiveness—not because of any inherent barrier to interaction, but because of a mismatch between the person's effective abilities and the assumptions underlying the interface design. We argue that automatic personalized interface generation is a feasible and scalable solution to this challenge. We present our Supple system, which can automatically generate interfaces adapted to a person's devices, tasks, preferences, and abilities. In this paper we formally define interface generation as an optimization problem and demonstrate that, despite a large solution space (of up to 1017 possible interfaces), the problem is computationally feasible. In fact, for a particular class of cost functions, Supple produces exact solutions in under a second for most cases, and in a little over a minute in the worst case encountered, thus enabling run-time generation of user interfaces. We further show how several different design criteria can be expressed in the cost function, enabling different kinds of personalization. We also demonstrate how this approach enables extensive user- and system-initiated run-time adaptations to the interfaces after they have been generated. Supple is not intended to replace human user interface designers—instead, it offers alternative user interfaces for those people whose devices, tasks, preferences, and abilities are not sufficiently addressed by the hand-crafted designs. Indeed, the results of our study show that, compared to manufacturers' defaults, interfaces automatically generated by Supple significantly improve speed, accuracy and satisfaction of people with motor impairments.Engineering and Applied Science

Engineering Adaptive Model-Driven User Interfaces for Enterprise Applications

Enterprise applications such as enterprise resource planning systems have numerous complex user interfaces (UIs). Usability problems plague these UIs because they are offered as a generic off-the-shelf solution to end-users with diverse needs in terms of their required features and layout preferences. Adaptive UIs can help in improving usability by tailoring the features and layout based on the context-of-use. The model-driven UI development approach offers the possibility of applying different types of adaptations on the various UI levels of abstraction. This approach forms the basis for many works researching the development of adaptive UIs. Yet, several gaps were identified in the state-of-the-art adaptive model-driven UI development systems. To fill these gaps, this thesis presents an approach that offers the following novel contributions: - The Cedar Architecture serves as a reference for developing adaptive model-driven enterprise application user interfaces. - Role-Based User Interface Simplification (RBUIS) is a mechanism for improving usability through adaptive behavior, by providing end-users with a minimal feature-set and an optimal layout based on the context-of-use. - Cedar Studio is an integrated development environment, which provides tool support for building adaptive model-driven enterprise application UIs using RBUIS based on the Cedar Architecture. The contributions were evaluated from the technical and human perspectives. Several metrics were established and applied to measure the technical characteristics of the proposed approach after integrating it into an open-source enterprise application. Additional insights about the approach were obtained through the opinions of industry experts and data from real-life projects. Usability studies showed the approach’s ability to significantly improve usability in terms of end-user efficiency, effectiveness and satisfaction

Interaction mining mobile apps

Millions of mobile apps are used by billions of users every day. Although the design of these apps play an important role in their adoption, the design process still remains complex and time intensive. At the same time, existing apps embody multiple solutions to numerous design problems faced by app developers. How do we make this design knowledge embedded in existing apps accessible to designers? And how can it help simplify the app design process? This dissertation introduces interaction mining, a technique to capture the designs of mobile apps in a way that supports data-driven design applications. It presents systems that implement interaction mining for Android apps without requiring any access to their source code making it possible to design mine apps at an unprecedented scale. It presents Rico, the largest publicly available mobile app design repository to date. It discusses how such repositories created using interaction mining can be used to train models that enable applications such as keyword and example-based search interactions for mobile screens and user flows. It also presents zero-integration performance testing (ZIPT), a novel technique for testing app designs. It demonstrates how ZIPT can be used to help designers understand which examples to draw from in the early stages of the app design process and perform comparative testing at scale with low cost and effort in the later stages of the process

Scalable User Interfaces for the Web / by Arman Danesh.

This thesis describes a new approach to developing and delivering user interfaces for Web applications. This approach, termed Scalable User Interfaces (SUI), is designed to allow a developer to create a single user interface definition for a Web application which can then be consumed, rendered and used by any device on the network. These devices can range from small displays such as mobile telephones to the full desktop-sized monitor displays used by personal computers. The goal of Scalable User Interfaces is to allow a single specification to be deployed on all devices without the need for the developer to specify any device-specific vocabularies, transformations, hinting or style sheets such as previous work in automated rendering for mixed displays and work in platform-independent user interface specification. Scalable User Interfaces provides a Flash-based implementation which highlights the utility of Flash as a tool for user interface design and research. Our work also illustrates the application of recursive rendering in laying out forms for various-sized displays

Abstract A Programming Language Basis for User Interface Management

The Mickey UIMS maps the user interface style and techniques of the Apple Macintosh onto the declarative constructs of Pascal. The relationships between user interfaces and the programming language control the interface generation. This imposes some restrictions on the possible styles of user interfaces but greatly enhances the usability of the UIMS