Designing user interfaces for a variety of users: Possible contributions from model-based development schemes

Abstract

As User Interfaces for All penetrate software applications, multi-dimensional design concepts become increasingly important. Both, for structured and user-oriented interface development, model-based approaches have turned out to be beneficial. However, most of these approaches remain vague with respect to the explicit representation of information about users and different modalities of interaction, as well as the structural and dynamic interfacing of user models to context and interaction models. However, these interfaces are required to provide different access possibilities for a functional core, and to allow switching between different modalities of interaction when serving a variety of users. In this paper we structure the requirements and evaluate existing model-based representation schemes against the structured set of requirements. The results reveal that model-based representation schemes should be enhanced through dedicated relationships and interface-management capabilities to mutually tune the models representing users, tasks, application-domain data, interaction styles and interactive devices. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.