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Feedback and feedforward are two fundamental mechanisms that support users’ activities while interacting with computing devices. While feedback can be easily solved by providing information to the users following the triggering of an action, feedforward is much more complex as it must provide information before an action is performed. For interactive applications where making a mistake has more impact than just reduced user comfort, correct feedforward is an essential step toward correctly informed, and thus safe, usage. Our approach, Fortunettes, is a generic mechanism providing a systematic way of designing feedforward addressing both action and presentation problems. Including a feedforward mechanism significantly increases the complexity of the interactive application hardening developers’ tasks to detect and correct defects. We build upon an existing formal notation based on Petri Nets for describing the behavior of interactive applications and present an approach that allows for adding correct and consistent feedforward.

Makerspaces are creative and learning environments, home to activities such as fabrication processes and Do-It-Yourself (DIY) tasks. However, containing equipment that are not commonly seen or handled, these spaces can look rather challenging to novice users. This paper is based on the Smart Makerspace research from Autodesk, which uses a smart workbench for an immersive instructional space for DIY tasks. Having its functionalities in mind and trying to overcome some of its limitations, we approach the concept building an immersive instructional space as a web platform. The platform, introduced to users in a makerspace, had a feedback that reflects its potential between novice and intermediate users, for creating facilitators and encouraging these users.

Fig. 1. Based on self-sustaining predictions (e.g. the sun will set), FORTNIoT can deduce when trigger-condition-action rules (e.g. IF sun set AND anyone home THEN lower the rolling shutter) will trigger in the near future and what effects they will cause (e.g. the rolling shutter will lower). Ubiquitous environments, such as smart homes, are becoming more intelligent and autonomous. As a result, their behavior becomes harder to grasp and unintended behavior becomes more likely. Researchers have contributed tools to better understand and validate an environments' past behavior (e.g. logs, end-user debugging), and to prevent unintended behavior. There is, however, a lack of tools that help users understand the future behavior of such an environment. Information about the actions it will perform, and why it will perform them, remains concealed. In this paper, we contribute FORTNIoT, a well-defined approach that combines self-sustaining predictions (e.g. weather forecasts) and simulations of trigger-condition-action rules to deduce when these rules will trigger in the future and what state changes they will cause to connected smart home entities. We implemented a proof-of-concept of this approach, as well as a visual demonstrator that shows such predictions, including causes and effects, in an overview of a smart home's behavior. A between-subject evaluation with 42 participants indicates that FORTNIoT predictions lead to a more accurate understanding of the future behavior, more confidence in that understanding, and more appropriate trust in what the system will (not) do. We envision a wide variety of situations where predictions about the future are beneficial to inhabitants of smart homes, such as debugging unintended behavior and managing conflicts by exception, and hope to spark a new generation of intelligible tools for ubiquitous environments.

When using computer-aided translation systems in a typical, professional translation workflow, there are several stages at which there is room for improvement. The SCATE (Smart Computer-Aided Translation Environment) project investigated several of these aspects, both from a human-computer interaction point of view, as well as from a purely technological side. This paper describes the SCATE research with respect to improved fuzzy matching, parallel treebanks, the integration of translation memories with machine translation, quality estimation, terminology extraction from comparable texts, the use of speech recognition in the translation process, and human computer interaction and interface design for the professional translation environment. For each of these topics, we describe the experiments we performed and the conclusions drawn, providing an overview of the highlights of the entire SCATE project. The research in this project was funded by the Flemish Agency for Innovation and Technology IWT, project number 13007.

International audience; Feedback is commonly used to explain what happened in an interface. What if questions, on the other hand, remain mostly unanswered. In this paper, we present the concept of enhanced widgets capable of visualizing their future state, which helps users to understand what will happen without committing to an action. We describe two approaches to extend GUI toolkits to support widget-level feedforward, and illustrate the usefulness of widget-level feedforward in a standardized interface to control the weather radar in commercial aircraft. In our evaluation, we found that users require less clicks to achieve tasks and are more confident about their actions when feedforward information was available. These findings suggest that widget-level feedforward is highly suitable in applications the user is unfamiliar with, or when high confidence is desirable.

Physical exercise is a primary component of cardiac rehabilitation. Interpreting exercise targets and being aware of the expected effort while rehabilitating independently at home is challenging for patients. Our work aims to assist cardiac patients in understanding their condition better and motivating them to achieve their exercise targets in a tele-rehabilitation setting. We introduce a patient-centric intelligible visualization approach to present prescribed rehabilitation targets to patients based on Metabolic Equivalent of Tasks (METs). We assessed efficacy of intelligible visualizations on patients’ comprehension in a lab study. We evaluated the impact on patient motivation and health outcomes in field studies. Patients were able to manage their prescribed activities, monitor their progress, and gained understanding on how their physical activities contribute to their rehabilitation targets. Patients confirmed that the intelligible visualizations motivated them to achieve their targets better. We observed an improvement in overall physical activity levels and health outcomes of patients.

In domains where users are exposed to large variations in visuo-spatial features among designs, they often spend excess time searching for common elements (features) in familiar locations. This paper contributes computational approaches to restructuring layouts such that features on a new, unvisited interface can be found quicker. We explore four concepts of familiarisation, inspired by the human visual system (HVS), to automatically generate a familiar design for each user. Given a history of previously visited interfaces, we restructure the spatial layout of the new (unseen) interface with the goal of making its elements more easily found. Familiariser is a browser-based implementation that automatically restructures webpage layouts based on the visual history of the user. Our evaluation with users provides first evidence favouring familiarisation. The project has partially received funding from the Academy of Finland project COMPUTED and the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement 637991).

Part 7: Design Rationale and Camera-Control; International audience; In the design process, designers make a wide variety of decisions that are essential to transform a design from a conceptual idea into a concrete solution. Recording and tracking design decisions, a first step to capturing the rationale of the design process, are tasks that until now are considered as cumbersome and too constraining. We used a holistic approach to design, deploy, and verify decision cards; a low threshold tool to capture, externalize, and contextualize design decisions during early stages of the design process. We evaluated the usefulness and validity of decision cards with both novice and expert designers. Our exploration results in valuable insights into how such decision cards are used, into the type of information that practitioners document as design decisions, and highlight the properties that make a recorded decision useful for supporting awareness and traceability on the design process.

In mobile tele-rehabilitation applications for Coronary Artery Disease (CAD) patients, behavior change plays a central role in influencing better therapy adherence and prevention of disease recurrence. However, creating sustainable behavior change that holds a beneficial impact over a prolonged period of time remains an important challenge. In this paper we discuss various models and frameworks related to persuasion and behavior change, and investigate how to incorporate these with a multidisciplinary user-centered design approach for creating a mobile tele-rehabilitation application. By implementing different concepts that contribute to behavior change and applying a set of distinct persuasive design patterns, we were able to translate the high-level goals of behavior theory into a mobile application that explicitly incorporates behavior change techniques and also offers a good overall user experience. We evaluated our system, HeartHab, in a lab setting and show that our approach leads to a high user acceptance and willingness to use the system in daily activities.

The increasing number of smart objects in our everyday life shapes how we interact beyond the desktop. In this workshop we discuss how advanced interactions with smart objects in the context of the Internet-of-Thingsshould be designed from various perspectives, such as HCI and AI as well as industry and academia.

International audience; We present Gestu-Wan, an intelligible gesture guidance system designed to support mid-air gesture-based interaction for walk-up-and-use displays. Although gesture-based interfaces have become more prevalent, there is currently very little uniformity with regard to gesture sets and the way gestures can be executed. This leads to confusion, bad user experiences and users who rather avoid than engage in interaction using mid-air gesturing. Our approach improves the visibility of gesture-based interfaces and facilitates execution of mid-air gestures without prior training. We compare Gestu-Wan with a static gesture guide, which shows that it can help users with both performing complex gestures as well as understanding how the gesture recognizer works.

International audience; Interactive large surfaces have recently become commonplace for interactions in public settings. The fact that people can engage with them and the spectrum of possible interactions, however, often remain invisible and can be confusing or ambiguous to passersby. In this paper, we explore the design of dynamic peripheral floor visualizations for revealing and mediating large surface interactions. Extending earlier work on interactive illuminated floors, we introduce a novel approach for leveraging floor displays in a secondary, assisting role to aid users in interacting with the primary display. We illustrate a series of visualizations with the illuminated floor of the Proxemic Flow system. In particular, we contribute a design space for peripheral floor visualizations that (a) provides peripheral information about tracking fidelity with personal halos, (b) makes interaction zones and borders explicit for easy opt-in and opt-out, and (c) gives cues inviting for spatial movement or possible next interaction steps through wave, trail, and footstep animations. We demonstrate our proposed techniques in the context of a large surface application and discuss important design considerations for assistive floor visualizations.

We present PaperPulse, a design and fabrication approach that enables designers without a technical background to produce standalone interactive paper artifacts by augmenting them with electronics. With PaperPulse, designers overlay pre-designed visual elements with widgets available in our design tool. PaperPulse provides designers with three families of widgets designed for smooth integration with paper, for an overall of 20 different interactive components. We also contribute a logic demonstration and recording approach, Pulsation, that allows for specifying functional relationships between widgets. Using the final design and the recorded Pulsation logic, PaperPulse generates layered electronic circuit designs, and code that can be deployed on a microcontroller. By following automatically generated assembly instructions, designers can seamlessly integrate the microcontroller and widgets in the final paper artifact.

The present paper describes an empirical user study intended to compare the programming efficiency of our proposed domain-specific language versus a mainstream event language when it comes to modify multimodal interactions. By concerted use of observations, interviews, and standardized questionnaires, we managed to measure the completion rates, completion time, code testing effort, and perceived difficulty of the programming tasks along with the perceived usability and perceived learnability of the tool supporting our proposed language. Based on this experience, we propose some guidelines for designing comparative user studies of programming languages. The paper also discusses the considerations we took into account when designing a multimodal interaction description language that intends to be well regarded by its users.

Nonverbal and unconscious behaviour is an important component of daily human-human interaction. This is especially true in situations such as public speaking, job interviews or information sensitive conversations, where researchers have shown that an increased awareness of one's behaviour can improve the outcome of the interaction. With wearable technology, such as Google Glass, we now have the opportunity to augment social interactions and provide realtime feedback on one's behaviour in an unobtrusive way. In this paper we present Logue, a system that provides realtime feedback on the presenters' openness, body energy and speech rate during public speaking. The system analyses the user's nonverbal behaviour using social signal processing techniques and gives visual feedback on a head-mounted display. We conducted two user studies with a staged and a real presentation scenario which yielded that Logue's feedback was perceived helpful and had a positive impact on the speaker's performance.

International audience; In this short extended abstract, we present the doctoral consortium of the Engineering Interactive Computing Systems (EICS) 2014 Symposium. Our goal is to make the doctoral consortium a useful event with a maximum benefit for the participants by having a dedicated event the day before the conference as well as the opportunity to present their on-going doctoral work to a wider audience during the conference.

There are currently toolkits that allow the specification of executable multimodal human-machine interaction models. Some provide domain-specific visual languages with which a broad range of interactions can be modeled but at the expense of bulky diagrams. Others instead, interpret concise specifications written in existing textual languages even though their non-specialized notations prevent the productivity improvement achievable through domain-specific ones. We propose a domain-specific textual language and its supporting toolkit; they both overcome the shortcomings of the existing approaches while retaining their strengths. The language provides notations and constructs specially tailored to compactly declare the event patterns raised during the execution of multimodal commands. The toolkit detects the occurrence of these patterns and invokes the functionality of a back-end system in response.

The misalignment between the timeframe of systems and that of their users can cause problems, especially when the system relies on implicit interaction. It makes it hard for users to understand what is happening and leaves them little chance to intervene. This paper introduces the design concept of slow-motion feedback, which can help to address this issue. A definition is provided, together with an overview of existing applications of this technique.

Learning to play a musical instrument such as the piano requires a substantial amount of practice and perseverance in learning to read and play from sheet music. Our interactivity demo allows people to learn to play songs without requiring sheet music reading skills. We project a graphical notation on top of a piano that indicates what key(s) need to be pressed and create a feedback loop that monitors the player's performance. We implemented The Augmented Piano (TAP), which is a straightforward combination of a physical piano with our alternative notation projected on top. Piano Attack (PAT) extends TAP with a shooting game that continuously provides game-based incentives for learning to play the piano.

Feedback and affordances are two of the most well-known principles in interaction design. Unfortunately, the related and equally important notion of feedforward has not been given as much consideration. Nevertheless, feedforward is a powerful design principle for bridging Norman's Gulf of Execution. We reframe feedforward by disambiguating it from related design principles such as feedback and perceived affordances, and identify new classes of feedforward. In addition, we present a reference framework that provides a means for designers to explore and recognize different opportunities for feedforward. Copyright © 2013 ACM.

Modern knowledge work consists of both individual and highly collaborative activities that are typically composed of a number of configuration, coordination and articulation processes. The desktop interface today, however, provides very little support for these processes and rather forces knowledge workers to adapt to the technology. We introduce co-Activity Manager, an activity-centric desktop system that (i) provides tools for ad hoc dynamic configuration of a desktop working context, (ii) supports both explicit and implicit articulation of ongoing work through a built-in collaboration manager and (iii) provides the means to coordinate and share working context with other users and devices. In this paper, we discuss the activity theory informed design of co-Activity Manager and report on a 14 day field deployment in a multi-disciplinary software development team. The study showed that the activity-centric workspace supports different individual and collaborative work configuration practices and that activity-centric collaboration is a two-phase process consisting of an activity sharing and per-activity coordination phase.

Persons with neurological disorders or spinal cord injuries, such as Cerebrovascular Accident (CVA) or Paraplegia pa- tients, experience signi cantly reduced physical abilities dur- ing their activities of daily living. By frequent and intense physical therapy, these patients can sustain or even enhance their functional performance. However, physical therapy, whether or not it is supported by technology, can currently only be followed in a rehabilitation centre under supervi- sion of a therapist. To provide technology-supported physi- cal therapy for independent use by the patient in the home situation, our current research explores pervasive technolo- gies for rehabilitation systems. In this paper, we describe our pervasive prototype 'Liftacube' for training of upper ex- tremities. An initial evaluation with patients with a neuro- logical disorder or spinal cord injury (CVA and paraplegia patients) and their therapists reveals a great appreciation for this motivating pervasive gaming prototype. Re ections on the technical set-up (such as size, form factor, and mate- rials) and interaction preferences (such as feedback, games, and movements for interaction) for pervasive rehabilitation systems in a residential environment are elaborated upon.

Choosing an appropriate toolkit for creating a multimodal interface is a cumbersome task. Several specialized toolkits include fusion and fission engines that allow developers to combine and decompose modalities to capture multimodal input and provide multimodal output. Unfortunately, the extent to which these toolkits can facilitate the creation of a multimodal interface is hard or impossible to estimate, due to the absence of a scale where the toolkit's capabilities can be measured on. In this paper, we propose a measurement scale, which allows the assessment of specialized toolkits without need for time-consuming testing or source code analysis. This scale is used to measure and compare the capabilities of three toolkits: CoGenIVE, HephaisTK and ICon.

Intelligent User Interfaces can benefit from having knowledge on the user's emotion. However, current implementations to detect affective states, are often constraining the user's freedom of movement by instrumenting her with sensors. This prevents affective computing from being deployed in naturalistic and ubiquitous computing contexts. In this paper, we present a novel system called mASqUE, which uses a set of association rules to infer someone's affective state from their body postures. This is done without any user instrumentation and using off-the-shelf and non-expensive commodity hardware: a depth camera tracks the body posture of the users and their postures are also used as an indicator of their openness. By combining the posture information with physiological sensors measurements we were able to mine a set of association rules relating postures to affective states. We demonstrate the possibility of inferring affective states from body postures in ubiquitous computing environments and our study also provides insights how this opens up new possibilities for IUI to access the affective states of users from body postures in a nonintrusive way.

There is a diversity of ways to determine a user's location in a pervasive environment today. On a large scale, this diversity often results in variability of location tracking conditions throughout the environment. For an important class of pervasive applications, which often rely on the ubiquitous availability of location tracking – location-based pervasive applications, the consistency of their behaviour under this variability cannot be guaranteed. This type of limitation raises a need for the adaptation of the application's behaviour that would reflect this variability. We investigated empirically how visualising different aspects of uncertainty about location and of the behaviour of localisation systems affects users’ impressions about a location-based application. The two components – an ontology that models properties of localisation systems and a set of mapping rules that define how these properties should be visualised in a user interface – are at the core of our approach to providing awareness. The results of the investigation show that the additional visual demand, intended for raising users’ awareness of uncertainty about their location tracking conditions, is perceived to be beneficial by users. We also reveal that different characteristics of this awareness are of different importance to users. Furthermore, we conclude that the particular importance depends on users’ personal profiles (e.g. their eyesight level), on the distance between the users (e.g. knowing about someone else's state is less important if they are far) and on the quality of tracking (the importance increases in problematic areas). On the basis of the obtained results and observations, we suggest a set of guidelines and visualisations, which could be used in designing pervasive applications that require location tracking.

In contrast with design flaws that occur in user interfaces, design flaws in physical spaces have a much higher cost and impact. Software is in fact fairly easy to change and update in contrast with legacy physical constructions where updating their physical appearance is often not an option. We present the Feedforward Torch, a mobile projection system that targets the augmentation of legacy hardware with feedforward information. Feedforward explains users what the results of their action will be, and can thus be seen as the opposite of feedback. A first user study suggests that providing feedforward in these environments could improve their usability.

Part 1: Long and Short Papers; International audience; In model-based user interface development, models at different levels of abstraction are used. While ideas may initially only be expressed in more abstract models, modifications and improvements according to user’s feedback will likely be made at the concrete level, which may lead to model inconsistencies that need to be fixed in every iteration. Transformations form the bridge between these models. Because one-to-one mappings between models cannot always be defined, these transformations are completely manual or they require manual post-treatment.We propose interactive but automatic transformations to address the mapping problem while still allowing designer’s creativity. To manage consistency and semantic correctness within and between models and therefore to foster iterative development processes, we are combining these with techniques to track decisions and modifications and techniques of intra- and inter-model validation. Our approach has been implemented for abstract and concrete user interface models using Eclipse-based frameworks for model-driven engineering. Our approach and tool support is illustrated by a case study.

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.

Complex 3D interaction in virtual environments may inhibit user interaction and cause frustration. Supporting adaptivity based on the detected user frustration can be considered as one promising solution to enhance user interaction. Our work proposes to provide adaptive assistance to users who are frustrated during their interaction with 3D user interfaces in virtual environments. The obtrusiveness of physiological measurements to detect frustration inspired us to investigate the pressure patterns exerted on a 3D input device for this purpose. The experiment presented in this paper has shown a great potential on utilizing the finger pressure measures as an alternative to physiological measures to indicate user frustration during interaction. Furthermore, the findings in this particular context showed that adaptation of haptic interaction was effective in increasing the user's performance and making users feel less frustrated in performing their tasks in the 3D environment.

Prototypes are often used to clarify and evaluate design alternatives for a graphical user interface. They help stakeholders to decide on different aspects by making them visible and concrete. This is a highly iterative process in which the prototypes evolve into a design artifact that is close enough to the envisioned result to be implemented. People with different roles are involved in prototyping. Our claim is that integrated or inter-operable tools help design information propagate among people while prototyping and making the transition more accurately into the software development phase. We make a first step towards such a solution by offering a framework, GRIP, in which such a tool should fit. We conducted a preliminary evaluation of the framework by using it to classify existing tools for prototyping and implementing a limited prototyping tool, GRIP-it, which can be integrated into the overall process.

A typical pervasive application executes in a changing environment: people, computing resources, software services and network connections come and go continuously. A robust pervasive application needs adapt to this changing context as long as there is an appropriate rewiring strategy that guarantees correct behavior. We combine the MERODE modeling methodology with the ReWiRe framework for creating interactive pervasive applications that can cope with changing environments. The core of our approach is a consistent environment model, which is essential to create (re)configurable context-aware pervasive applications. We aggregate different ontologies that provide the required semantics to describe almost any target environment. We present a case study that shows a interactive pervasive application for media access that incorporates parental control on media content and can migrate between devices. The application builds upon models of the run-time environment represented as system states for dedicated rewiring strategies.

Efficient delivery of information in vehicular networks is crucial for the creation of useful and usable applications that need to cope with nomadic large-scale environments. Context-awareness is often key to improve efficiency of a vehicle network since it allows to make informed decisions on the data routing, data locality and data necessity for different moving objects. In this paper we show how the social network of vehicle residents, as part of the overall context, allows us to improve the information sharing in the vehicular network significantly. We demonstrate this by deploying a social ubiquitous-help-system (UHS) on top of a vehicular network. We analyze how UHS operates in a vehicular network using a network simulation of realistic large scale vehicular movement data and show that the social interactions increases the efficiency, relevance and quality of information in data delivery. ispartof: pages:1188-1194 ispartof: Proceedings of the 2010 ACM Symposium on Applied Computing pages:1188-1194 ispartof: SAC location:Sierre date:22 Mar - 26 Mar 2010 status: published

International audience; 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.

We present an approach to exploit social and spatio-temporal context in order to improve information dissemination in dynamic largescale 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. ispartof: pages:107-116 ispartof: LNCS vol:6439 issue:6439 pages:107-116 ispartof: First International Joint Conference on Ambient Intelligence (AmI'10) location:Malaga, Spain date:10 Nov - 12 Nov 2010 status: published

Bringing together heterogeneous computing devices and appliances gives rise to a spontaneous environment where resources exchange messages, such as a mobile phone telling the car's stereo to mute. We also witness computer-augmented resources become physically simpler to use (e. g. less buttons) but become more complex to handle in their digital dimension (e. g. overloaded user interfaces). As a consequence, the behavior of the pervasive applications leveraging these resources gets even more complex to understand and configure. This demands for tools that help developers and end-users inspect and manipulate the current state of the pervasive computing environment during execution time. We present models and tools that support the development and deployment of applications that can be observed at runtime, by means of the messages they exchange, the properties they manipulate and the rules they define.

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 C,betting 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.

In current mobile user interface design tools, it is time consuming to export a design to the target device. This makes it hard for designers to iterate over the user interfaces they are creating. We propose Gummy-live, a GUI builder for mobile devices allowing designers to test and observe immediately on the target device each step they take in the GUI builder. This way, designers are stimulated to iteratively test and refine user interface prototypes in order to take the target device characteristics into account.

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.

Multi-touch large display interfaces are becoming increasingly popular in public spaces. These spaces impose specific requirements on the accessibility of the user interfaces: most users are not familiar with the interface and expectations with regard to user experience are very high. Multi-touch interaction beyond the traditional move-rotate-scale interactions is often unknown to the public and can become exceedingly complex. We introduce TouchGhosts: visual guides that are embedded in the multi-touch user interface and that demonstrate the available interactions to the user. TouchGhosts are activated while using an interface, providing guidance on the fly and within the context-of-use. Our approach allows to define reconfigurable strategies to decide how or when a TouchGhost should be activated and which particular visualization will be presented to the user.

Pervasive computing environments are complex to interact with due to the dynamic assembly of interaction resources and the need to adapt to sudden changes in the environment configuration. When the complexity of such an environment is masked by the underlying computing system, end-users are often left with limited or no control over their interactive space. This brings up the need to make users aware of their surroundings and to provide them with runtime control over the environment configuration. We present a semantic meta-layer that encapsulates a model, view and controller to support the design of context-aware pervasive applications that can be controlled and evaluated by the end-users at runtime.

The use of handheld computers as a tool to enrich the museum experience has found its way into many museums, opening up new possibilities to increase the attractiveness of museum visits, especially for youngsters. We developed a mobile guide framework that supports the creation of mobile guides and adheres to social-constructivist principles of learning. The mobile museum game we created with this framework aims at developing the social, cognitive and technical skills of the users. Large scale evaluations show the potential power of our approach to stimulate interaction between youngsters and to create a playful learning experience.

The increasing complexity of pervasive computing environments puts the current software development methods to the test. There is a large variation in different types of hardware that need to be addressed. Besides, there is no guarantee the environment does not evolve, making the software developed for the initial environment deprecated and in need for updates or reconfiguration. Software deployed in such an environment should be sufficiently dynamic to cope with new environment configurations, even while the system is in use. This goes beyond coping with new contexts of use and building context-aware systems: while most approaches are mainly focused on how the software behavior adapts according to the changing context in a fixed environment, our approach, ReWiRe, allows the environment configuration to change over time. (8 pages)

In this paper we introduce MuiCSer, a conceptual process framework for Multi-disciplinary User-centred Software Engineering (UCSE) processes. UCSE processes strive for the combination of basic principles and practices from software engineering and user-centred design approaches in order to increase the overall user experience with the resulting product. The MuiCSer framework aims to provide a common understanding of important components and associated activities of UCSE processes. As such, the conceptual framework acts as a frame of reference for future research regarding various aspects and concepts related to this kind of processes, including models, development artefacts and tools. We present the MuiCSer process framework and illustrate its instantiation in customized processes for the (re)design of a system. The conceptual framework has been helpful to investigate the role of members of a multi-disciplinary team when realizing artefacts in a model-based approach. In particular process coverage of existing artefact transformation tools has been studied.

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.

In recent years HCI researchers have developed a broad range of new interfaces that diverge from the "window, icon, menu, pointing device" (WIMP) paradigm, employing a variety of novel interaction techniques and devices. Developers of these next generation user interfaces face challenges that are currently not addressed by state of the art user interface software tools. As part of the user interface software community's effort to address these challenges, the concept of a User Interface Description Language (UIDL), reemerge as a promising approach. To date, the UIDL research area has demonstrated extensive development, mainly targeting multi-platform and multi-modal user interfaces. However, many open questions remain regarding the usefulness and effectiveness of UIDLs in supporting the development of next generation interfaces. The aim of this workshop is to bring together both developers of next generation user interfaces and UIDL researchers in an effort to identify key challenges facing this community, to jointly develop new approaches aimed at solving these challenges and finally to consider future spaces for UIDL research.

Semantic service descriptions have paved the way for flexible interaction with services in a mobile computing environment. Services can be automatically discovered, invoked and even composed. On the contrary, the user interfaces for interacting with these services are often still designed by hand. This approach poses a serious threat to the overall flexibility of the system. To make the user interface design process scale, it should be automated as much as possible. We propose to augment service descriptions with high-level user interface models to support automatic user interface adaptation. Our method builds upon OWL-S, an ontology for Semantic Web Services, by connecting a collection of OWL-S services to a hierarchical task structure and selected presentation information. This allows end-users to interact with services on a variety of platforms.