Integrating Adaptation and HCI Concepts to Support Usability in User Interfaces - A Rule-based Approach

Abstract

A common problem in information systems development is to provide support for adaptation, to automatically adjust their services to different users and contexts. User Interfaces (UI) are required to adapt to those contexts and to satisfy specific criteria and standards to guarantee usability. Several methods have been created to ensure a degree of usability in UI. However, these methods focus mainly in the design stage of the development process. The benefits of these methods may be lost during execution time, since they do not address the necessity to dynamically adapt the interfaces both to context and users. To address this issue it is necessary to integrate User Interface Design with Adaptation, to ensure that UI usability is preserved at the execution time, for different users and contexts. This paper proposes the framework Tukuchiy, a rulebased system that dynamically generates Adaptative User Interfaces, based in HCI precepts. This guarantees their usability during execution time, while taking into account user preferences and context. This paper focused in the rule-based system of Tukuchiy. That rule system includes usability criteria commonly used for web pages, which were mapped to a desktop application.