Automatically generating personalized user interfaces with Supple
patible with the current design practice
Download 5.78 Mb. View original pdf
|
| patible with the current design practice. Indeed, nearly all model-based user interface toolkits require that users begin the UI design process by creating abstract models of the tasks or data (or both. Even if a system provides a graphical environment for designing such models (as does TERESA [67], for example, this is still inconsistent with the current design practice, which stresses the importance of exploring the space of concrete (even if low fidelity) designs from the very beginning of the design process [10,48,74, 78]. This high upfront cost has been identified as an important barrier to adoption of automatic user interface generation technology [56], and it turns user interface design into an abstract programming-like task, which is not our intention. Instead, we believe that interfaces for typical users in typical situations should continue to be created by expert designers using current design methods. The abstract interface model should be automatically inferred as the designer creates and explores the concrete designs for the typical user. Indeed, this approach has been attempted in a recent system called Gummy [54]. Gummy observes the designer as he or she creates the default version of a user interface and it then automatically suggests designs for alternative platforms. We intend to develop such a design too, which—through only a small amount of additional interaction with the designer—will capture his or her rationale and design preferences, so that they can be reflected in the automatically generated alternatives. Alternatively, the specification can be obtained by automatically reverse engineering a concrete user interface. The feasibility of this approach has been previously demonstrated for traditional (non-AJAX) websites and more recently for desktop user interfaces [12,45]. While some manual intervention will be required tore ne such automatically extracted specifications, this approach may significantly reduce the barrier to automatically generating alternative user interfaces for existing applications. Download 5.78 Mb. Share with your friends:
|