Design and development of multidevice user interfaces through multiple logical descriptions

Abstract

Abstract-The increasing availability of new types of interaction platforms raises a number of issues for designers and developers. There is a need for new methods and tools to support development of nomadic applications, which can be accessed through a variety of devices. This paper presents a solution, based on the use of three levels of abstractions, that allows designers to focus on the relevant logical aspects and avoid dealing with a plethora of low-level details. We have defined a number of transformations able to obtain user interfaces from such abstractions, taking into account the available platforms and their interaction modalities while preserving usability. The transformations are supported by an authoring tool, TERESA, which provides designers and developers with various levels of automatic support and several possibilities for tailoring such transformations to their needs.Index Terms-Design tools and techniques, user interfaces, heterogeneous clients, multiplatform user interfaces, authoring environments, abstract user interfaces, user interface design, task models.

Authoring Multi-device Web Applications with Database Access

“…Our approach is based on a tool, TERESA [4], which applies transformations and logical descriptions to generate interactive applications for different devices starting with different abstract models. Here we present an extension of the approach able to overcome the two main limitations of the original environment: generation of only static Web pages, and need for providing designers with greater control over the UI generated.…”

“…Many types of model-based approaches have been proposed: in the software engineering area there are several tools based on UML; for data-intensive Web applications there are approaches such as WebML [2]; examples of model-based approaches in the user interface area are UsiXML [7] and TERESA XML [4]. In the latter community, there is a general consensus regarding the useful logical descriptions [1][6] supporting user interface design: the task and object level, which reflects the user view of the interactive system in terms of logical activities and objects manipulated; the abstract user interface, which provides a modality-independent description of the user interface; the concrete user interface, which provides a modality-dependent but implementation languageindependent description of the user interface; The final implementation, in an implementation language for UIs.…”

User interface description languages for next generation user interfaces

“…Examples include Plastic User Interfaces [12], UIML [1], XIML [10], UsiXML [5] and the TERESA XML [7]. However, only few UIDLs currently address the development of next generation user interfaces, supporting interaction styles such as virtual reality (VR), mixed reality, ambient intelligence and tangible user interfaces (TUIs): InTML [2] describes VR applications in a platform-independent and toolkitindependent manner.…”

Cascading Dialog Modeling with UsiXML

“…Is some cases the description of the dialog is supported by an external language (e.g., XUL), however, quite often, the dialog is embedded into the UIDL, such as is the case of UsiXML, XUL and UIML. Currently only UsiXML [10] and TERESA XML [12] have 4 levels of abstraction as proposed by the Cameleon Reference Framework. XUL and UIML's dialog specification are oriented to implementation, which corresponds to the level CUI and FUI in the framework Cameleon.…”

“…Their approach is based on a formal description technique called Dialog Flow Notation (DFN) that provides constructs for the design of modular navigation models for multimodal Web applications. Mori, Paterno and Santoro [12] have proposed a design method and tool called TERESA for dealing with the progressive transformation of abstract description of the user interface to final implementations whilst try to preserve the usability and plasticity of the user interface. Similarly, Luyten et al [11] have proposed a transformational approach for derive final user interface dialog from task models.…”