Romanian Journal of
Human - Computer Interaction

Vol.6, No.3, 2013

ISSN 1843-4460

Special Issue
Context aware adaptation of user interfaces
Guest Editor : Jean Vanderdonckt

 


Contents

Context aware adaptation of user interfaces.
Jean Vanderdonckt
 
193 - 194
A need, no app: just do it! But do people support dynamic composition of interactive systems for fulfilling emergent needs?
Yoann Gabillon, Gaëlle Calvary, Nadine Mandran, Humbert Fiorino
 
195 - 210
A Unified Model for Context-aware Adaptation of User Interfaces.
Vivian Genaro Motti, Jean Vanderdonckt
 
211 - 248
The Generic Interaction Protocol: Increasing portability of distributed physical user interfaces.
Gervasio Varela, Alejandro Paz-Lopez, Jose A. Becerra, Richard J. Duro
 
249 - 268
Sustaining Designers' and Users' Quality of Life in the Paradigm of Plastic UIs.
Eric Ceret, Alfonso García Frey, Sophie Dupuy-Chessa,  Gaëlle Calvary
 
269 - 289
 

Abstracts

Context aware adaptation of user interfaces

Jean Vanderdonckt
Louvain Interaction Laboratory - Université catholique de Louvain
Place des Doyens, 1, 1348, Louvain la Neuve
E-mail: jean.vanderdonckt@uclouvain.be

Abstract. 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.

Keywords: context aware adaptation, user interfaces, model-based development.

Cite this paper as:
Vanderdonckt, J. Context aware adaptation of user interfaces. Editorial to special issue. Revista Romana de Interactiune Om-Calculator 6(3), 193-194. 2013.

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A need, no app: just do it! But do people support dynamic composition of interactive systems for fulfilling emergent needs?

Yoann Gabillon1, Gaëlle Calvary2, Nadine Mandran2, Humbert Fiorino2
1Centre de Recherche Public – Gabriel Lippmann
41 Rue du Brill, L-4422 Belvaux, Luxembourg
E-mail: gabillon@lippmann.lu

2Grenoble Institute of Technology, Université Joseph Fourier, CNRS, LIG
41, rue des Mathématiques, BP53, 38041 Grenoble cedex 9, France
E-mail: {gaelle.calvary, nadine.mandran, humbert.fiorino}@imag.fr

Abstract. In Human Computer Interaction engineering, both the context of use (<user, platform, environment>) and the user task (<goal, procedure>) are supposed to be set at design time. However, in ubiquitous computing, the context of use is dynamic, making user needs possibly emerge on the fly. As a consequence, there is a need to go beyond pre-computed User Interfaces (UIs) and to be capable of dynamically composing UIs for fulfilling such emergent needs. This paper relates a user study conducted for understanding to which extent dynamic composition of UIs can match user needs. The study consists of 26 qualitative interviews and 3 focus groups. It provides interesting insights for future research.

Keywords: Ambient computing, User Interface, dynamic composition, social study, qualitative interview, focus group.

Cite this paper as:
Gabillon, Y., Calvary, G., Mandran, N., Fiorino, H. A need, no app: just do it! But do people support dynamic composition of interactive systems for fulfilling emergent needs?. Revista Romana de Interactiune Om-Calculator 6(3), 195-210, 2013.

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A Unified Model for Context-aware Adaptation of User Interfaces

Vivian Genaro Motti, Jean Vanderdonckt

Louvain Interaction Laboratory - Université catholique de Louvain
Place des Doyens, 1, 1348, Louvain la Neuve
E-mail: vivian.genaromotti@uclouvain.be

Abstract. 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.

Keywords: modeling, context-awareness, adaptation, user interfaces.

Cite this paper as:
Motti, V.G., Vanderdonckt, J. A Unified Model for Context-aware Adaptation of User Interfaces. Revista Romana de Interactiune Om-Calculator 6(3), 211-248, 2013.

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The Generic Interaction Protocol: Increasing portability of distributed physical user interfaces

Gervasio Varela, Alejandro Paz-Lopez, Jose A. Becerra, Richard J. Duro

Integrated Group for Engineering Research – University of A Coruña
C/ Mendizábal, S/N, 15403, Ferrol, Spain
E-mail: gervasio.varela@udc.es

Abstract. Natural user interfaces want to liberate the user from having to learn new concepts to interact with computers. They do that by taking advantage of our senses and our own knowledge about world in order to build the user interface. Physical user interfaces are a prominent example, where physical objects are enhanced to represent actions or information that the system must exchange with the user. One of the main drawbacks of physical user interfaces is often related with the difficulty to decouple system logic from the specific technology used to build the user interface, especially when multiple environments or scenarios should be supported. This paper presents an abstraction technology for user interaction devices that allows the building of physical user interfaces that are physically and logically decoupled from the system logic.

Keywords: usixml, distributed user interfaces, physical user interfaces, ambient intelligence, ubiquitous computing.

Cite this paper as:
Varela, G., Paz-Lopez, A, Becerra, J., Duro, R. The Generic Interaction Protocol: Increasing portability of distributed physical user interfaces. Revista Romana de Interactiune Om-Calculator 6(3), 249-268, 2013.

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Sustaining Designers' and Users' Quality of Life in the Paradigm of Plastic UIs

Eric Ceret1, Alfonso García Frey2, Sophie Dupuy-Chessa3, Gaëlle Calvary1
1Grenoble INP, 2UJF, 3UPMF, 123CNRS, 123LIG
41 rue des mathématiques, 38400 Saint Martin d’Hères, France
E-mail: {alfonso.garcia-frey, eric.ceret, sophie.dupuy, gaelle.calvary}@imag.fr

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: UI Plasticity, Self-Explanatory Interfaces, Process Model Flexibility, Model-Driven Engineering; User Interfaces; Design Tools.

Cite this paper as:
Ceret, E., Garcia-Frey, A., Dupuy-Chessa, S., Calvary, G. Sustaining Designers' and Users' Quality of Life in the Paradigm of Plastic UIs. Revista Romana de Interactiune Om-Calculator 6(3), 269-289, 2013.

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