The use of mobile devices to browse on the Web has become increasingly popular as a consequence of the easy access to the Internet. However, moving from the desktop development to the mobile platform features requests to the developers an important focus on the interaction elements which fit into the interaction demands. The frameworks front-end is the solution most adopted by Web developers for working with application’s adaptation supported by responsive Web design techniques. Nevertheless, this technique has shortcomings that directly impact in the interaction elements and user satisfaction. This article presents a hybrid adaptation approach of context-sensitive Web interfaces with multimodality support called HyMobWeb. The approach proposal is an expansion of the adaptation capacity of the application concerning the variables of the user context in combination with the different interaction methods. A case study was conducted and data collected showed the great acceptance of the proposal in the perspective of developers who used it. The findings suggest that HyMobWeb brings significative contributions to the developers’ work.
Several approaches have emerged to support the development of mobile web applications (apps). Front-end frameworks (FeF) have emerged to support developers in the construction of responsive mobile web apps. However, these frameworks do not provide resources to handle easily variables of the context of use and to deal with different modalities of interaction. Considering this gap, we proposed the HyMobWeb, an approach that assists developers in working with these aspects. By grasping the popularity of the FeFs, HyMobWeb proposes a flexible and reusable approach based on FeF structure. It works with a hybrid approach that treats the adaptation in two phases. The static one, performed in the development time, allows developers to implement the resources of adaptation. The dynamic one performs the adaptation during the run-time. In this article, we present the HyMobWeb dynamic adaptation approach. As end-users are the receivers of the dynamic adaptation our evaluation was carried out in the perspective of this audience. The results showed that the adaptations regarding the context of use were the ones that presented more impact on the user experience. We concluded that the HyMobWeb dynamic adaptation provides ways to enhance user interaction in mobile web apps when compared with RWD resources.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.