A reusable approach to software support for adaptive navigation

Abstract

Adaptive navigation intends to guide users to their specific objectives within the application by altering the normal way the application allows to navigate, aiming to provide better experience for users with diverse needs and in different context conditions. Knowledge about activities that the user performs at runtime is crucial for adaptation decision making. It not only serves as a basis for evaluating relevance of the available information (such as user status, usage patterns, and context of use), but also facilitates reasoning about user needs. However, implementation of the user activity tracking capability often relies on intimate knowledge of the target application, which makes it difficult to develop loosely coupled modules to address separate concerns. In this paper, we describe a reusable approach to the development of the user activity tracking capability with the intent to support adaptive navigation. We use aspect-oriented instrumentation to capture user interface events and conduct model-based analysis to identify tasks that the user performs. A proof-of-concept experiment shows that our approach makes it possible to develop adaptation code that is reusable when the user interface and its adaptation logic evolve.