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Model-driven development of user interfaces has become increasingly powerful in recent years. Unfortunately, model-driven approaches have the inherent limitation that they cannot handle the informal nature of some of the artifacts used in truly multidisciplinary user interface development such as storyboards, sketches, scenarios and personas. In this chapter, we present an approach and tool support for multidisciplinary user interface development bridging informal and formal artifacts in the design and development process. Key features of the approach are the usage of annotated storyboards, which can be connected to other models through an underlying meta-model, and cross-toolkit design support based on an abstract user interface model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Western society, the elderly represent a rapidly growing demographic group. For this group, dementia has become an important cause of dependencies on others and causes difficulties with independent living. Typical symptoms of the dementia syndrome are decreased location awareness and difficulties in situating ones activities in time, thus hindering long term plans and activities. We present our approach in creating an interactive system tailored for the needs of the early phases of the dementia syndrome. Given the increasing literacy with mobile technologies in this group, we propose an approach that exploits mobile technology in combination with the physical and social context to support prolonged independent living. Our system strengthens the involvement of caregivers through the patient΄s social network. We show that applications for people suffering from dementia can be created by explicitly taking into account context in the design process. Context dependencies that are defined in an early stage in the development process are propagated as part of the runtime behavior of the interactive system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present an approach to exploit social and spatio-temporal context in order to improve information dissemination in dynamic large-scale public spaces. We illustrate it by applying a proposed measure of geo-social relevance of each individual in a simulated vehicular network and by comparing the performance of different network message passing techniques in an inter-vehicle `help-me-best-and-do-it-fast΄ communication scenario. We conclude that the use of social networking capabilities of an individual combined with knowledge about their spatio-temporal context information significantly improves purposeful interaction between individuals in terms of both the efficiency of the network data dissemination and the quality of the delivered information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In educational settings, current digital technologies often work counter-productively because people using them with separation and isolation. This paper describes a set of multi-touch multimedia interaction applications that were especially designed to enhance collaboration between users. We present the underlying framework for creating such applications. Our applications were created for supporting typical collaborative tasks performed by secondary students. We present our findings on the usage of these applications by the users in the settings of a secondary school classroom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The knowledge of spatial arrangements of objects is an important component for the design of migratable user interfaces that target pervasive environments. Objects in these environments are often moving around individually, which leads to a highly dynamic and unpredictable environment. Due to its nature, spatial information cannot be described exhaustively, and uncertainty and imprecision need to be taken into account during both the design phase and at runtime. We present an approach to model dynamic spatial information, providing it with the ability to interpret to some extent uncertain and imprecise knowledge. We then integrate this type of spatial-awareness into ReWiRe, a framework for designing interactive pervasive environments, in order to improve its user-interface distribution techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent work demonstrates the potential for extracting patterns from users΄ behavior as detected by sensors. Since there is currently no generalized framework for reasoning about activity-aware applications, designers can only rely on the existing systems for guidance. However, these systems often use a custom, domain-specific definition of activity pattern. Consequently the guidelines designers can extract from individual systems are limited to the specific application domains of those applications. In this paper, we introduce five high-level guidelines or commandments for designing activity-aware applications. By considering the issues we outlined in this paper, designers will be able to avoid common mistakes inherent in designing activity-aware applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current user-centred software engineering (UCSE) approaches provide many techniques to combine know-how available in multidisciplinary teams. Although the involvement of various disciplines is beneficial for the user experience of the future application, the transition from a user needs analysis to a structured interaction analysis and UI design is not always straightforward. We propose storyboards, enriched by metadata, to specify functional and non-functional requirements. Accompanying tool support should facilitate the creation and use of storyboards. We used a meta-storyboard for the verification of storyboarding approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The design ideal of the invisible computer, prevalent in the vision of ambient intelligence (AmI), has led to a number of interaction challenges. The complex nature of AmI environments together with limited feedback and insufficient means to override the system can result in users who feel frustrated and out of control. In this paper, we explore the potential of visualising the system state to improve user understanding. We use projectors to overlay the environment with a graphical representation that connects sensors and devices with the actions they trigger and the effects those actions produce. We also provided users with a simple voice-controlled command to cancel the last action. A small first-use study suggested that our technique might indeed improve understanding and support users in forming a reliable mental model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Currently, it is difficult for a designer to create user interfaces that are of high aesthetic quality for a continuously growing range of devices with varied screen sizes. Most existing approaches use abstractions that only support form-based user interfaces. These user interfaces may be usable but are of low aesthetic quality. In this paper, we present a technique to design adaptive graphical user interfaces by example (i.e., user interfaces that can adapt to the target platform, the user, etc.), which can produce user interfaces of high aesthetic quality while reducing the development cost inherent to manual approaches. Designing adaptive user interfaces by example could lead to a new generation of design tools that put adaptive user interface development within the reach of designers as well as developers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current tools for multidisciplinary teams in user-centered software engineering (UCSE) provide little support for the different approaches of the various disciplines in the project team. Although multidisciplinary teams are getting more and more involved in UCSE projects, an efficient approach to communicate clearly and to pass results of a user needs analysis to other team members without loss of information is still missing. Based on previous experiences, we propose storyboards as a key component in such tools. Storyboards contain sketched information of users, activities, devices and the context of a future application. The comprehensible and intuitive notation and accompanying tool support presented in this paper will enhance communication and efficiency within the multidisciplinary team during UCSE projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pervasive environments can be hard to configure and interact with using handheld computing devices, due to the mismatch between physical and digital worlds. Usually, smart resources in the user΄s vicinity are discovered and presented in a menu on the user΄s device from where they can be accessed. However, in environments with many embedded resources it becomes hard to identify resources by means of a textual description and to get aware of the tasks they support. As an alternative to menu-driven interfaces, we demonstrate annotated photos as a means for controlling a pervasive environment. We present as part of our approach a tool that enables people to picture their own environment and use photos as building blocks to create an interactive digital view on their surroundings. To demonstrate and evaluate our approach, we engineered a pervasive prototype application that is operated through a photo-based user interface and assembled using ontologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The design of interactive software that populates an ambient space is a complex and ad-hoc process with traditional software development approaches. In an ambient space, important building blocks can be both physical objects within the user΄s reach and software objects accessible from within that space. However, putting many heterogeneous resources together to create a single system mostly requires writing a large amount of glue code before such a system is operational. Besides, users all have their own needs and preferences to interact with various kinds of environments which often means that the system behavior should adapt to a specific context of use while the system is being used. In this paper we present a methodology to orchestrate resources on an abstract level and hence configure a pervasive computing environment. We use a semantic layer to model behavior and illustrate its use in an application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]