Bridging the Gap between a Behavioural Formal Description Technique and User Interface description language: Enhancing ICO with a Graphical User Interface markup language

International audienceIn the last years, User Interface Description Languages (UIDLs) appeared as a suitable solution for developing interactive systems. In order to implement reliable and efficient applications, we propose to employ a formal description technique called ICO (Interactive Cooperative Object) that has been developed to cope with complex behaviours of interactive systems including event-based and multimodal interactions. So far, ICO is able to describe most of the parts of an interactive system, from functional core concerns to fine grain interaction techniques, but, even if it addresses parts of the rendering, it still not has means to describe the effective rendering of such interactive system. This paper presents a solution to overcome this gap using markup languages. A first technique is based on the Java technology called JavaFX and a second technique is based on the emergent UsiXML language for describing user interface components for multi-target platforms. The proposed approach offers a bridge between markup language based descriptions of the user interface components and a robust technique for describing behaviour using ICO modelling. Furthermore, this paper highlights how it is possible to take advantage from both behavioural and markup language description techniques to propose a new model-based approach for prototyping interactive systems. The proposed approach is fully illustrated by a case study using an interactive application embedded into interactive aircraft cockpits

Ifaces: Adaptative user interfaces for ambient intelligence

Proceedings of the IADIS International Conference on Interfaces and Human Computer Interaction. Amsterdam, The Netherlands 25-27 July 2008In this paper we present an ontology language to model an environment and its graphical user interface in the field of ambient intelligence. This language allows a simple definition of the environment and automatically produces its associated interaction interface. The interface dynamically readjusts to the characteristics of the environment and the available devices. Therefore it adapts to the necessities of the people who have to use it and their resources. The system has been developed and tested employing a real ambient intelligence environment.This work has been partly funded by HADA project number TIN2007 – 64718 and the UAM – Indra Chair in Ambient Intelligence

Collaborative explicit plasticity framework: a conceptual scheme for the generation of plastic and group-aware user interfaces

The advent of new advances in mobile computing has changed the manner we do our daily work, even enabling us to perform collaborative activities. However, current groupware approaches do not offer an integrating and efficient solution that jointly tackles the flexibility and heterogeneity inherent to mobility as well as the awareness aspects intrinsic to collaborative environments. Issues related to the diversity of contexts of use are collected under the term plasticity. A great amount of tools have emerged offering a solution to some of these issues, although always focused on individual scenarios. We are working on reusing and specializing some already existing plasticity tools to the groupware design. The aim is to offer the benefits from plasticity and awareness jointly, trying to reach a real collaboration and a deeper understanding of multi-environment groupware scenarios. In particular, this paper presents a conceptual framework aimed at being a reference for the generation of plastic User Interfaces for collaborative environments in a systematic and comprehensive way. Starting from a previous conceptual framework for individual environments, inspired on the model-based approach, we introduce specific components and considerations related to groupware

Towards useful and usable interaction design tools: CanonSketch

Despite all the effort dedicated to bringing better User-Centered Design (UCD) tools to market, current studies show that the industry is still dominated by tools that do not support the activities and workstyles of designers. Also, there is a growing need for interaction design tools aimed at software engineers, a problem related to bringing usability into the software engineering processes. We propose a new workstyle model that can be effectively used to envision, design and evaluate a new generation of innovative interaction and software design tools, aimed at integrating usability and software engineering. We illustrate the effectiveness of our model by describing a new tool, called CanonSketch, that was built in order to support UCD in terms of the dimensions in our workstyle model. We also describe an evaluation study aimed at contrasting paper prototyping with our tool as well as the level of workstyle support.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

The New Era of Business Intelligence Applications: Buildingfrom a Collaborative Point of View

Collaborative business intelligence (BI) iswidely embraced by enterprises as a way of making themost of their business processes. However, decision mak-ers usually work in isolation without the knowledge or thetime needed to obtain and analyze all the available infor-mation for making decisions. Unfortunately, collaborativeBI is currently based on exchanging e-mails and documentsbetween participants. As a result, information may be lost,participants may become disoriented, and the decision-making task may not yield the needed results. The authorspropose a modeling language aimed at modeling andeliciting the goals and information needs of participants ofcollaborative BI systems. This approach is based on inno-vative methods to elicit and model collaborative systemsand BI requirements. A controlled experiment was per-formed to validate this language, assessing its under-standability, scalability, efficiency, and user satisfaction byanalyzing two collaborative BI systems. By using theframework proposed in this work, clear guideless can beprovided regarding: (1) collaborative tasks, (2) their par-ticipants, and (3) the information to be shared among them.By using the approach to design collaborative BI systems,practitioners may easily trace every element needed in thedecision processes, avoiding the loss of information andfacilitating the collaboration of the stakeholders of suchprocesses

An Adaptive User Interface Framework for eHealth Services based on UIML

New sensory technologies and smaller, more capable mobile devices open opportunities for pervasive computing in the healthcare sector. Patients as well as medical professionals are, from a information and communication technology (ICT) point of view, better equipped than ever before. Despite this, many hospitals and other healthcare service providers have yet to exploit the potential unleashed by these technologies. In this paper, we present a framework for adaptive user interfaces for home care and smart hospital services. The framework uses the current context to provide healthcare professionals or patients with simpler, more efficient user interfaces. In a home care environment, user interface adaption is needed to tailor user interfaces to patients needs and impairments. In a smart hospital, user interface adaption considers medical professionals’ preferences and priorities. In addition, by using context to make input suggestions simplifies the input and limits the scope for errors. Our frameworks uses a modelbased approach and includes the current context in the interface generation process

User Interface Abstraction for enabling TV set based Inclusive Access to the Information Society

199 p.The television (TV) set is present in most homes worldwide, and is the most used Information and Communication Technology (ICT). Despite its large implantation in the market, the interactive services consumption on TV set is limited. This thesis focuses on overcoming the following limiting factors: (i) limited Human Computer Interaction and (ii) lack of considering user’s real life context in the digital television (dTV) service integration strategy. Making interactive services accessible to TV set’s large user base, and especially to the most vulnerable ones, is understood as the path to integrate the mankind with the information society. This thesis explores the use of user interface abstraction technologies to reach the introduced goals. The main contributions of this thesis are: (i) an approach to enable the universally accessible remote control of the TV set, (ii) an approach for the provision of universally accessible interactive services through TV sets, and (iii) an approach for the provision of universally accessible services in the TV user’s real life context. We have implemented the contributing approaches for different use cases, and we have evaluated them with real users, achieving good results

CASSIS: a Modeling Language for Customizable User Interface Designs

Abstract. Current user interface modeling languages usually focus on modeling a single user interface and have a fixed set of user interface components; adding another user interface component requires an extension of the language. In this paper we present CASSIS, a concise language that supports creation of user interface components using models instead of language extensions. It also allows the specification of design-time and runtime user interface variations. The support for variations has been used to generate constraints for custom user interface components, to specify design patterns and design decisions. CASSIS has been used in several projects including a multi-disciplinary applied research project

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