Building a customizable user interface framework using hyperlinks for smart devices

Abstract

A new customizable user interface for smart devices based on hyperlink associability is presented. Although mobile devices should be easy to use, many current devices have complex and widely varying interfaces. The proposed framework, Hyrax, attempts to improve the menu structure and accessibility of functions while considering user preferences. In Hyrax, the user interface is constructed and customized using hyperlinks for access to application functions. We focus herein on the user interface of a phone and present the customizable menu structure of the phone using XLink defined in W3C and the External Function Interface (EFI) defined in the WAP Forum specifications. To implement the proposed framework, we have developed a design tool to customize the user interface with hyperlinks and a runtime environment, which manages the objects generated by the tool with the hyperlinks, to evaluate the framework. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2007.