9. Discussion
Despite more than two decades of research on model-based automatic user interface generation, there remains a lot of skepticism about the very idea of automatic interface generation. In this section, we explicitly address some of the common concerns and indicate the novel aspects of our work that make it likely to have practical impact.
Automatically generated user interfaces are not as good as those created by human designers. What is the value of
systems like S
UPPLE
?
Automatically generated user interfaces are typically perceived as being less aesthetically pleasing than those created by human designers [56]. Indeed, we do believe that handcrafted user interfaces, which reflect designers creativity and understanding of applications semantics, will—for typical users in typical situations—result in more desirable interfaces than those created by automated tools. Supple, therefore, is not intended to replace or compete with human designers. Instead,
Supple offers alternative user interfaces for those users whose devices, tasks, preferences, and abilities are not sufficiently addressed by the mainstream handcrafted designs. Because there exist a myriad of distinct individuals, each with his or her own devices, tasks, preferences, and abilities, the problem of providing each person with the most appropriate interface is simply one of scale there are not enough human experts to provide each user with an interface reflecting that person’s context. The results of our user study demonstrate that people with motor impairments both perform better with and strongly prefer interfaces generated by Supple compared to the manually designed default interfaces.
Our approach stands in contrast to the majority of prior work on model-based user interface design, where the automated design tools were used primarily as a means to incrementally improve existing design processes.
The creation of model-based user interfaces requires a large amount of upfront effort. This model creation is incom-
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