ABSTRACT
Recent years have seen the introduction of many types of computers
and devices. In this SIG we want to discuss how to provide developers
with tools, methods and languages able to support both the development
of single interactive applications for multiple platforms and the
dynamic execution of these applications in a changing environment
while preserving usability. Since CHI is the most important conference
on human-computer interaction, it is the most suitable place where
to discuss such issues, the results achieved so far, compare them
with other results obtained by other groups in the world and discuss
the opportunity provided by joining efforts.
Keywords
Context-dependent Interactive Systems, Multi-platform Applications,
Model-base Design, Usability.
INTRODUCTION
Recent years have seen the introduction of many types of computers
and devices. In order to perform their tasks, people now have available
a wide variety of computational devices ranging from cellular telephones,
personal digital assistants (PDA’s), to Internet enabled televisions
(WebTV) and electronic whiteboards powered by high end desktop machines.
Users wish to be able to seamlessly access information and services
regardless of the device they are using, even when the system or
the environment changes dynamically. To this end, computer-based
applications need to run on a wide spectrum of devices, and should
adapt like a chameleon to the changing context of use. For software
developers, this introduces the difficult problems of constructing
multiple versions of single applications and endowing these versions
with the ability to dynamically respond to changes in context such
as network connectivity, user location and ambient sound and lighting
conditions.
In this SIG we want to discuss how
to provide developers with tools, methods and languages able to
support both the development of single interactive applications
for multiple platforms and the dynamic execution of these applications
in a changing environment while preserving usability.
Creating different versions of applications for different devices
engenders extra development, and maintenance cost and complicates
the problems of configuration management. A proliferation of versions
dilutes the resources available for usability engineering, and requires
expensive maintenance of cross-platform consistency of the user
interface. Additionally, current software architectures and development
tools provide little support for creating applications that change
dynamically in response to changes in their environment and context,
or that must share data amongst heterogeneous device types.
Many dimensions must be considered, specifically, context of use
may vary over:
- Actors: e.g., their number, their
interests, the tasks enacted by each user
- Platforms: e.g., device kinds,
number of devices, device resources: screen size, sound capabilities
- Environments: e.g., location,
location properties (e.g., ambient noise, lighting)
- System Resources: e.g., network
availability, latency, bandwidth, CPU, memory
Context of use may vary over all these
dimensions and their mutual links. For example, a PDA held in one's
hand near an electronic device could become a universal remote control
for handling the device.
To address these issues some projects have recently started such
as the CAMELEON project (http://giove.cnuce.cnr.it/cameleon.html)
that involves ISTI-CNR Pisa (coordinator), University of Grenoble,
University of Louvain, Motorola Italy, IS3 and the CONSENSUS project
(http://www.consensus-online.org) that involves SAP (coordinator),
CURE, IBM, Nokia, Fujitsu.
Within this large problem space, the SIG will focus on variation
in the interaction resources available to an application. Examples
of such resources include basic platform capability, accessible
display area, sound and tactile interaction channels and network
bandwidth. These resources vary according to the type of device
on which the application runs, as well as the physical and environmental
conditions. We choose to concentrate our efforts on these problems
because it has become difficult to develop applications that may
have to run under very varied conditions of available resources
and where such resources may change radically during execution.
In particular, variability in resource affects our ability to predict
and ensure the usability of the application.
We want to pay attention to systematic methods to support the design
of usable systems, tools supporting such methods, representations
able to formalize the information that the methods require and runtime
techniques able to provide dynamic support. In particular we want
to consider model-based approaches: as Myers and others [3] pointed
out the increasing availability of new interaction platforms has
raised a new interest in this approach in order to allow developers
to define the input and output needs of their applications, vendors
to describe the input and output capabilities of their devices,
and users to specify their preferences. Then, a model-based system
can choose appropriate interaction techniques taking all of these
into account.
In addition issues related to the production and utilization of
cross platform user interface guidelines will be raised.
SIG PARTICIPANTS
One of the purposes of this SIG is to facilitate communication between
researchers working on related projects and possible users of the
results of such projects. In particular people involved in mobile
HCI issues will be the target group of this SIG.
We foresee three types of users of such results:
- companies whose business is in
developing multi-context applications that can be interested in
using methods, models and tools developed,
- end-users who would like to have
applications obtained using the developed approaches,
- and universities and research
institutes that will be interested in the tools for teaching purposes
and for their projects.
SIG ORGANIZATION
The activity plan for the SIG is:
- Introduction of the SIG goals
and participants (10 minutes);
- Presentation of tool support for
model based design of multi-platform user interfaces (10 minutes
- Fabio Paternò), discussing tools supporting development
of the relevant models and transformations among the information
that they contain.
- Discussion of usability issues
in multi-platform user interfaces (10 minutes – Manfred
Tscheligi), discussing how to represent information contained
in relevant models in XML-based languages based on user interface
guidelines.
- Interactive discussion with participants
on the research topics, selection of those that seem more important,
and comments on the solutions proposed. In this part of the SIG
it will be possible to split participants into different groups,
each one associated with a specific topic. We think there are
many important issues to discuss, including the development of
markup languages for UI, protocols for inter-device communication,
and a vision for what moveable interactive applications should
be. (40 minutes)
- Discussion on future plans, in
particular on how to create a common background in this area among
those who are interested in it and how to influence international
bodies such as W3C consortium, ISO, European Commission, National
Science Foundation (20 minutes).
We will organise a mailing list for
SIG participants, along with a Web site with the possibility of
having full access to the working papers, tools and deliverables
of the related projects. We will also consider the possibility of
proposing a special issue on this topic in an international journal.
REFERENCES
- Abrams, M., Phanouriou, C., Batongbacal,
A., Williams, S., Shuster, J. UIML: An Appliance-Independent XML
User Interface Language, Proceedings of the 8th WWW conference,
1999. Available at http: //www.harmonia.com/resources/ papers/www8_0599/index.htm
- Calvary, G., Coutaz, J., Thevenin,
D., A Unifying Reference Framework for the Development of Plastic
User Interfaces, Proceedings Engineering Human-Computer Interaction,
pp.173-192, 2001.
- Myers, B., Hudson, S., Pausch,
R. Past, Present, Future of User Interface Tools. Transactions
on Computer-Human Interaction, ACM, 7(1), March 2000, pp. 3-28.
- Einsenstein, J., Vanderdonckt,
J., Puerta, A. Applying Model-Based Techniques to the Development
of UIs for Mobile Computers, Proceedings IUI'01: International
Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, pp 69-76, ACM Press,
2001.
- Mori, G., Paternò, F.,
Santoro, C., Tool Support for Designing Nomadic Applications,
Proceedings Intelligent User Interfaces ‘03, pp.141-148,
ACM Press, 2003.
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