A model-driven engineering approach for the usability of plastic user interfaces

Abstract

Plastic User Interfaces (UI) are able to adapt to their context of use while preserving usability. Research efforts have focused so far, on the functional aspect of UI adaptation, while neglecting the usability dimension. This paper investigates how the notion of mapping as promoted by Model Driven Engineering (MDE), can be exploited to control UI adaptation according to explicit usability criteria. In our approach, a run-time UI is a graph of models related by mappings. Each model (e.g., the task model, the Abstract UI, the Concrete UI, and the final UI) describes the UI from a specific perspective from high-level design decisions (conveyed by the task model) to low-level executable code (i.e. the final UI). A mapping between source and target models specifies the usability properties that are preserved when transforming source models into target models. This article presents a meta-model for the notion of mapping and shows how it is applied to plastic UIs. © 2008 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.