A case study using a methodological approach to developing user interfaces for elderly and disabled people

In this paper, we present a case study on the development of interfaces for elderly and disabled users. The domain of the case study was situated in the home environment, where we focused on producing affordable technologies to enable users to interact with and to control home appliances. We have developed ambient user interfaces that are integrated in familiar home artefacts, such as televisions and digital picture frames. These interfaces are connected remotely to a home network and are adaptive to users’ expected increasing physical and cognitive needs. To support the development of the project, we created a novel methodology that is grounded in the ethical issues associated with a project of this nature. Our success with it has led to us presenting it here as a practical approach to developing user interfaces for a range of interactive applications, especially where there may be diverse user populations. This paper describes our journey through this project, how the methodology has been used throughout and the development of our user interfaces and their evaluation

Extending an XML environment definition language for spoken dialogue and web-based interfaces

This is an electronic version of the paper presented at the Workshop "Developing User Interfaces with XML: Advances on User Interface Description Languages", during the International Working Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces (AVI), held in Gallipoli (Italy) on 2004In this work we describe how we employ XML-compliant languages to define an intelligent environment. This language represents the environment, its entities and their relationships. The XML environment definition is transformed in a middleware layer that provides interaction with the environment. Additionally, this XML definition language has been extended to support two different user interfaces. A spoken dialogue interface is created by means of specific linguistic information. GUI interaction information is converted in a web-based interface.This work has been sponsored by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology, project number TIC2000-046

Simplicity, consistency, universality, flexibility and familiarity: the SCUFF principles for developing user interfaces for ambient computer systems

This paper describes the user interface design, and subsequent usability evaluation of the EU FP6 funded Easyline+ project, which involved the development of ambient assistive technology to support elderly and disabled people in their interaction with kitchen appliances. During this process, established usability design guidelines and principles were considered. The authors’ analysis of the applicability of these has led to the development of a new set of principles, specifically for the design of ambient computer systems. This set of principles is referred to as SCUFF, an acronym for simplicity, consistency, universality, flexibility and familiarity. These evaluations suggest that adoption of the SCUFF principles was successful for the Easyline+ project, and that they can be used for other ambient technology projects, either as complementary to, or as an alternative to more generic and partially relevant principles

Sampo-UI: A Full Stack JavaScript Framework for Developing Semantic Portal User Interfaces

This paper presents a new software framework, SAMPO-UI, for developing user interfaces for semantic portals. The goal is to provide the end-user with multiple application perspectives to Linked Data knowledge graphs, and a two-step usage cycle based on faceted search combined with ready-to-use tooling for data analysis. For the software developer, the SAMPO-UI framework makes it possible to create highly customizable, user-friendly, and responsive user interfaces using current state-of-the-art JavaScript libraries and data from SPARQL endpoints, while saving substantial coding effort. SAMPO-UI is published on GitHub under the open MIT License and has been utilized in several internal and external projects. The framework has been used thus far in creating six published and five forth-coming portals, mostly related to the Cultural Heritage domain, that have had tens of thousands of end-users on the Web.Peer reviewe

A Scalable and Low-Cost Interactive Shape-Changing Display

Research in new display technologies has garnered great interest in the recent years. Curved screens and foldable displays have already been commercialized. However a relatively new field of research is in dynamic shape-changing or shape-shifting displays. These displays utilize the ability to change their shape dynamically as another dimension of representing visual data. These displays potentially augmented with colors, can help visualize three dimensional data such as terrains, city and building plans, and medical data. They can also be used in new ways of Human-Computer Interaction by developing user interfaces that transform physically based on the scenario. While there is research being done on new ways of using shape displays for interaction and manipulation, not much focus has been given to the issue of cost and scalability. The general shape displays which are currently being developed have individual pixels which need to be actuated. The commercial linear actuators which are used in these displays are extremely expensive and are not meant for such purposes. This thesis presents a design for a dynamic pixel-based shape changing display which focuses on cost and scalability by using custom designed modular actuators and sensor packages

Domain-Specific Modeling and Code Generation for Cross-Platform Multi-Device Mobile Apps

Nowadays, mobile devices constitute the most common computing device. This new computing model has brought intense competition among hardware and software providers who are continuously introducing increasingly powerful mobile devices and innovative OSs into the market. In consequence, cross-platform and multi-device development has become a priority for software companies that want to reach the widest possible audience. However, developing an application for several platforms implies high costs and technical complexity. Currently, there are several frameworks that allow cross-platform application development. However, these approaches still require manual programming. My research proposes to face the challenge of the mobile revolution by exploiting abstraction, modeling and code generation, in the spirit of the modern paradigm of Model Driven Engineering