Skip to main content Skip to main navigation

Publication

Increasing the Flexibility of Run-Time Generated User Interfaces by Using UIML

Kai Breiner; Marc Seissler; Gerrit Meixner; Malte Brunnlieb; Thilo Rauch; Peter Reuter; Philipp Diebold; Markus Kleine; Lars Scherer
In: Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Visual Formalisms for Patterns. International Workshop on Visual Formalisms for Patterns (VFfP), located at 2010 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing, September 21, Madrid, Spain, ECEASST, 2010.

Abstract

Development of user interfaces is a secondary field in the production industry, but the impact of user interface quality is increasing independent of the application domain, which is a significant factor of success for the entire product. To approach the resulting diversity of user interfaces, we present our idea of a universal interaction device – the SmartMote – which is capable of providing control over various devices in these environments. Depending on the context of use, the visualization of the SmartMote is generated and adapted during run-time in order to provide a homogeneous intra-device user experience. For developers, the design of the user interface will be reduced to the definition of a (room-based) Use Model (RUM), comprising, beside other information, user task and context descriptions, with the exception of information concerning the presentation. The contribution of our paper is the improvement of the already functional SmartMote generation process in terms of the separation between the content to be displayed and the way it will be displayed (separation of concerns). A presentation model consisting of a pattern matching language and the corresponding presentation templates – based on UIML – is introduced.