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Strategic usability is widely recognized as a challenge, as moving from scattered to strategic usability requires organizations to operate significant changes. The current solutions are hardly accessible and complicated to implement. STRATUS is a questionnaire for cost-effectively assessing strategic usability. A companion model enables to easily analyze and describe the current state of strategic usability according to five dimensions and related indicators. A pilot STRATUS survey compared the responses between novices and experts in usability. It highlighted dependencies between experience and usability awareness, as well as positive correlations between the presence of usability staff and strategical use of usability. The questionnaire needs now to be validated by means of a longitudinal study. Another promising track towards its validation consists in further investigating the causations between the dimensions of strategic usability.

This paper presents MenuErgo, a software environment for designing a menu bar along with its pull-down menus and sub-menus of a graphical user interface by automatic evaluation of menu usability guidelines according to four evaluation strategies: an active strategy initiated by the system, a passive strategy initiated by the designer, a mixed strategy shared by both of them, and a strategy by conceptual units based on the semantic domain. The MenuErgo software architecture consists of an evaluation trigerrer, an evaluation engine, a presenter, and a knowledge base of 58 usability guidelines whose evaluation is automated. A qualitative exploratory study reports on the reactions of nine designers after their usage of MenuErgo on a case study for designing menus for a multimedia application.

Adapting graphical user interface is extremely important to streamline interaction and to meet changing requirement of the context of use. This shortcoming is common and repetitive for GUI and necessitates further considerations with the growing complexity of interactive systems. However most of works addressing adaptation capitalize on design-time and predefined rules, which do not always meet real users preferences and expectations during use. WiSel is a tool-supported approach based on our framework for supporting Intelligent Agile Runtime Adaptation. It consists on a mixing of both knowledge-based (adaptive) and user-drived (adaptable) UI customization. Both adaptation behaviors work together on considering runtime end-users preferences to improve adaptation of interaction object at runtime. We investigated how end-users involvement can improve widget selection and enhance the user satisfaction. A preliminary pilot study was conducted to demonstrate the feasibility of our approach and its impact on usability in term of controllability, transparency and predictability.

This paper discusses challenges in contextual task analysis and the need of tools that support analysts to collect such information in context. Specifically we argue that the analysis of collaborative and distributed tasks can be supported by ambulatory assessment tools. We illustrate how contextual task analysis can be supported by TEMPEST, a platform originally created for experience sampling and more generally, longitudinal ambulatory assessment studies. We present a case study that illustrates the extent to which this tool meets the needs of real-world task analysis, describing the gains in efficiency it can provide but also directions for the development of tool support for task analysis.

This Workshop is the fourth in a series on Distributed User Interfaces. On this occasion, the workshop is focused on DUIs and Multimodal interaction. The main goal is to join together people working in extending the Web and other user interfaces to allow multiple modes of interaction such as GUI, TUI, Speech, Vision, Pen, Gestures, Haptic interfaces, etc. Multimodal interaction poses the challenge of transforming the way we interact with applications, creating new paradigms for developers and end-users. Through active group discussion, participants will have the chance to share their knowledge and experience to advance in this field. These articles were submitted to the 4th Workshop on Distributed User Interfaces and Multimodal Interaction at ICWE 2014 that was held on July 1st, 2014 in Toulouse, France

Ensuring responsive design of web applications requires their user interfaces to be able to adapt according to different contexts of use, which subsume the end users, the devices and platforms used to carry out the interactive tasks, and also the environment in which they occur. To address the challenges posed by responsive design, aiming to simplify their development by factoring out the common parts from the specific ones, this paper presents Quill, a web-based development environment that enables various stakeholders of a web application to collaboratively adopt a model-based design of the user interface for cross-platform deployment. The paper establishes a series of requirements for collaborative model-based design of cross-platform web user interfaces motivated by the literature, observational and situational design. It then elaborates on potential solutions that satisfy these requirements and explains the solution selected for Quill. A user survey has been conducted to determine how stakeholders appreciate model-based design user interface and how they estimate the importance of the requirements that lead to Quill.

Context-aware adaptation of user interfaces have been investigated since the early 80's to provide mechanisms for stakeholders to propose, implement and execute adaptation, enabling users to efficiently interact with adaptive and adaptable applications. Today, adapting UIs according to the context of use becomes inevitable. Not only because users interact with applications from many distinct environments (platforms, devices and users' profile vary significantly), but also because such applications must provide a high usability level regardless of the contexts of use, efficiently adapting themselves according to the context. In this sense, Serenoa project proposes its 2nd workshop, to join experts in the domain of context-aware adaptation to exchange experiences, discuss current trends, promote approaches, and raise awareness for this field.

Designing interactive systems for multiple contexts of use becomes a burden when the end user interaction takes place in distinct scenarios whose specific characteristics and constraints vary and must be carefully considered. Stakeholders face then two main challenges: they are not aware of what among several context information is significantly relevant to consider, or how to appropriately adapt the user interfaces according to the information considered. Furthermore, stakeholders cannot simply rely on existing UI editors once they usually do not provide enough support for adaptation. Thus, adaptation is often ignored, resulting in user interfaces that are only suitable for static and conventional contexts of use. To support the design of user interfaces that are properly adapted to their target context, this paper proposes a novel methodology to enhance sketching activities by proposing to the end user context-aware adaptation guidelines. This work aims at raising awareness about context-aware adaptation since the early stages of the UI design.

With the growing need for intelligent software, exploring the potential of Machine Learning (ML) algorithms for User Interface (UI) adaptation becomes an ultimate requirement. The work reported in this paper aims at enhancing the UI interaction by using a Rule Management Engine (RME) in order to handle a training phase for personalization. This phase is intended to teach to the system novel adaptation strategies based on the end-user feedback concerning his interaction (history, preferences…). The goal is also to ensure an adaptation learning by capitalizing on the user feedbacks via a promoting/demoting technique, and then to employ it later in different levels of the UI development.

Electronic sketching has received a recurrence of interest over the years and again nowadays within the mobile web context, where there are diverse devices, operating systems and browsers to be considered. Multi-platform (e.g. web-based) sketching systems can be constructed to allow users to sketch on their device of preference. However, web applications do not always perform equally on all devices, and this is a critical issue, especially for applications that require instant visual feedback such as sketch-based systems. This paper describes a user study conducted to identify the most appropriate response rates (expressed in frames per second) for end users while sketching. The results are expected to guide stakeholders in defining response parameters for sketching applications on the web by showing intervals that are accepted, tolerated, and rejected by end users.

Prototypes are essential tools for design activities for they allow designers to realize and evaluate ideas in early stages of the development. Sketching is a primary tool for constructing prototypes of interactive systems and has been used in developing low-fidelity prototypes for a long time. The computational support for sketching has been receiving a recurrence of interest in the last 45 years and again nowadays within the mobile web context, where there are diverse devices to be considered. The research reported on this paper aims at addressing issues on multi-platform collaborative sketching using a prototyping tool for user interfaces. The tool was built to aid the investigation on how designers sketch using many different devices and collaborate using their sketches during design sessions.

The purpose of this work is to understand some existing user interface patterns and to adapt them to the constraints of mobile devices running on the Android system. We focus mainly on the Master/Detail pattern and on the surrounding patterns. The contributions are multiple: our background study consists of a brief recall of the principles of some existing user interface patterns. Based on it, we provide an adapted version of each pattern targeted to mobile phones through a framework called MandroiD. We will also present a basic case study application that takes advantage of the framework. This application is developed with Android guidelines in mind. Indeed, one of our goals is to provide the reader with some knowledge about Android applications development. Limitations of general mobile devices (e.g., the small screen) require of "reducing" homogeneous elements. MandroiD overcome theses constraints. A statistical analysis is conducted on the developed mini-application. Evaluation of it shows a general satisfaction concerning the ergonomy of the application by various users.

This document exposes the most relevant issues regarding the development of Distributed User Interfaces (DUIs) to present the specific features that are not covered by traditional development processes. A transversal approach to tackle these new aspects is also proposed. Therefore, the goal of this workshop is to promote the discussion about the emerging topic of distributed user interfaces, answering a set of key questions: what, when, how, why distribute a user interface among different devices.

The language reading direction is probably one of the most determinant factors influencing the successful internationalization of graphical user interfaces, beyond their mere translation. Western languages are read from left to right and top to bottom, while Arabic languages and Hebrew are read from right to left and top to bottom, and Oriental languages are read from top to bottom. In order to address this challenge, we introduce flippable user interfaces that enable the end user to change the reading direction of a graphical user interface by flipping it into the desired reading direction by direct manipulation. This operation automatically and dynamically changes the user interface layout based on a generalized concept of reading direction and translates it according to the end user's preferences.

Distributed User Interfaces (DUIs) have been imagined in order to support end users in carrying out interactive tasks that could be distributed in space (e.g., some subtasks are carried out in different locations) and time (e.g., some subtasks are carried out during different time intervals, depending on who is contributing to the task. Classical interactive applications involving a single-user, single-context user interface are rarely developed in a way that distributing parts or whole of the user interface is made effective and efficient. In order to facilitate the deployment of such distributed user interfaces, this thesis provides the following contributions: a series of models capturing the various aspects of a DUI based on new concepts (i.e. distribution scene and scenario), an engineering method for specifying DUIs based on these concepts, and a supporting toolkit providing the developers with distribution primitives.

This paper describes a model-based approach for designing Distributed User Interfaces (DUIs), i.e., graphical user interfaces that are distributed along the following dimensions: end user, display device, computing platform, and physical environment. The three pillars of this model-based approach are: (i) a Concrete User Interface model for DUIs incorporating the distribution dimensions and expressing any DUI element in a XML-compliant format until the granularity of an individual DUI element is reached, (ii) a specification language for DUI distribution primitives that have been defined in a user interface toolkit, and (iii), a step wise method for modeling a DUI based on the concepts of a distribution graph expressing a distribution scenario that can be played, based on the distribution primitives. A distribution graph consists of a state-transition diagram whose states represent significant DUI distribution states and whose transitions are labeled by an Event-Condition-Action (ECA) representation. The actions involved in this format call any distribution primitive belonging to the DUI toolkit. This model-based approach is exemplified on two simple DUIs: one DUI for the Pictionary game and another one for the Minesweeper game. They are then incorporated into a larger composed DUI game of the goose where cells could trigger the other two games.

Nowadays several Computer-Aided Software Engineering environments exploit Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) techniques in order to generate a single user interface for a given computing platform or multi-platform user interfaces for several computing platforms simultaneously. Therefore, there is a need to assess the usability of those generated user interfaces, either taken in isolation or compared to each other. This paper describes an MDE approach that generates multi-platform graphical user interfaces (e.g., desktop, web) that will be subject to an exploratory controlled experiment. The usability of user interfaces generated for the two mentioned platforms and used on multiple display devices (i.e., standard size, large, and small screens) has been examined in terms of satisfaction, effectiveness and efficiency. An experiment with a factorial design for repeated measures was conducted for 31 participants, i.e., postgraduate students and professors selected by convenience sampling. The data were collected with the help of questionnaires and forms and were analyzed using parametric and non-parametric tests such as ANOVA with repeated measures and Friedman's test, respectively. Efficiency was significantly better in large screens than in small ones as well as in the desktop platform rather than in the web platform, with a confidence level of 95%. The experiment also suggests that satisfaction tends to be better in standard size screens than in small ones. The results suggest that the tested MDE approach should incorporate enhancements in its multi-device/platform user interface generation process in order to improve its generated usability.

This workshop is aimed at investigating open issues in research and development for user interface engineering based on User Interface eXtensible Markup Language (UsiXML), a XML-compliant User Interface Description Language and at reviewing existing solutions that address these issues.

Information Systems UI (User Interface) generation from declarative models has been the focus of numerous and various approaches in the human computer interaction community. Typically, the different approaches use the different models based on their singular aspects. This paper proposes a new process that combines the task, domain, and user models taken together to drive the information system user interface design and code behind generation. To this end, we propose a framework, i.e., a methodological process, a meta-model and a software prototype called DB-USE.

Current trends in web development still are attached to the web page paradigm. Nevertheless, new uses of already available technology and recent development in terms of concepts, as the asynchronous communication, have produced a new generation of web applications: Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). These web applications tries to fulfill user expectations in terms of usability, reliability, quality, maintainability and performance. In our work, we are going to present a design methodology that pursued as goal describing and developing User Interfaces of RIAs in a standardized way.

This research aims to propose a multi-modal fusion framework for high-level data fusion between two or more modalities. It takes as input low level features extracted from different system devices, analyses and identifies intrinsic meanings in these data. Extracted meanings are mutually compared to identify complementarities, ambiguities and inconsistencies to better understand the user intention when interacting with the system. The whole fusion life cycle will be described and evaluated in an office environment scenario, where two co-workers interact by voice and movements, which might show their intentions. The fusion in this case is focusing on combining modalities for capturing a context to enhance the user experience.

This paper sets out to describe on-going research and development activities aiming to provide new insights to building advanced user interfaces by assembling diverse widgets. To this end, we draw upon the relative merits and drawbacks of the two dominant approaches for developing interactive applications, namely toolkit programming and model-based user interface engineering. We motivate the problem by considering a simple example representative of what toolkit programming may deliver and then contrast its implications on prevailing model-based UI principles and practice. Our analysis reveals the key role of widget abstraction in developing specification-based tools to manage radically different widget sets in a uniform manner. The ultimate goal of this work is to extend MBUI engineering approaches so as to enable them to take account of richer interaction vocabularies becoming increasingly available.

Model-based user interface (UI) development environments are aimed at generating one or many UIs from a single model or a family of models. Model-driven engineering (MDE) of UIs is assumed to be superior to those environments since they make the UI design knowledge visible, explicit, and external, for instance as model-to-model transformations and model-to-code compilation rules. These transformations and rules are often considered inflexible, complex to express, and hard to develop by UI designers and developers who are not necessarily experts in MDE. In order to overcome these shortcomings, this work introduces the concept of transformation profile that consists of two definitions: model mappings, which connect source and target models in a flexible way, and transformation templates, which gather high-level parameters to apply to transformations. This work applies these concepts in a general-purpose method for MDE of information systems. Transformation profiles can be effectively and efficiently used in any circumstances in which transformation knowledge needs to be modified by non-experts, and flexibility, modifiability, and customization are required.

Organizations that adopt Business Process (BP) modeling as a source to implement enterprise systems struggle to maintain such a link. However, not all types of organizations are structured for professionals to adequately manage processes and supporting systems. Even though there are techniques to align business processes and systems, there lacks a solution that addresses User Interfaces (UI). The negative impact of focusing only on functional aspects is that many changes on processes that affect UIs are not carefully considered. Therefore, our solution aims at aligning business processes with UIs by adopting a model-driven approach. Such support is targeted at large organizations to enable them to manage those links.

This paper undertakes with collaborative software development taking into account requirements emerged from recent progress in technologies relevant to networks and computing devices. Considering this technological breakthrough, especially under the light of the consequently sharply growing online virtual communities, we can deduce that a new substance is given to the software supporting collaborative practices for multiple environments. In such cases, one important aspect to consider is the user interfaces (UIs) design supporting group work appropriately. The results today offer a rich insight to the desired groupware functionality and the features devised to facilitate such functionality (i.e., replication models, object sharing, floor control, etc). On the other hand, very little is known about their capability to facilitate generation of multi-user interfaces to groupware applications. With the advent of model-based user interface engineering, which signifies a move towards transformation-based approaches to generating the user interface, one challenge is bridging across these two perspectives. The current work seeks to contribute to this goal by identifying the type of models needed to capture collaborative behavior in synchronous multiple user interface settings as well as generating the collaborative user interface by making use of suitable platform-oriented architectural models.

AudioCubes is a novel tangible user interface allowing any person interested by sound design such as sound creators, and music trainers to intuitively explore and create dynamically changing sound. A new sound is created by manipulating distributed cube tangible user interface that can be coupled wirelessly by locating them in the interaction range of each other on a table. At any time, a sound processing network combines operational properties of AudioCubes, such as location on a plane or in space, movement, arrangement with other cubes, and layout. Sound algorithm parameters and the configuration of the sound processing network can be changed simultaneously, allowing a fast and convenient exploration of sound creation space that creates a new interaction technique for creating sounds.

AudioCubes is a novel tangible user interface allowing any person interested by sound design such as sound creators, and music trainers to intuitively explore and create dynamically changing sound. A new sound is created by manipulating distributed cube tangible user interface that can be coupled wirelessly by locating them in the interaction range of each other on a table. At any time, a sound processing network combines operational properties of AudioCubes, such as location on a plane or in space, movement, arrangement with other cubes, and layout. Sound algorithm parameters and the configuration of the sound processing network can be changed simultaneously, allowing a fast and convenient exploration of sound creation space that creates a new interaction technique for creating sounds.

From a topological model of a working environment, MIGRIXML automatically generates a virtual reality environment for controlling the run-time migration of a graphical user interface from one computing platform to another one (e.g., from a desktop to a pocket computer), from one interaction surface to another (e.g., from a laptop to a wall screen) at run-time. For this purpose, any user interface subject to migration is described in USer Interface eXtensible Markup Language regarding its look & feel as well as the platforms and the surfaces involved in the migration. Each interface, in part or in whole, can be attached to a platform or a surface, detached from it, and migrated across platforms or interaction surfaces. Instead of communicating data and code during the migration, the description of the user interface of concern is wirelessly passed from one platform to another one to be regenerated on the target platform. To ensure a continuous control of the run-time migration, MIGRIXML automatically generates a world model representing the context of use where the source/target platforms/interaction surfaces are represented. Finally, migrating a user interface becomes as natural as its direct manipulation from one platform to another exactly in the same way as it is done on a single platform.

Multi-agent systems are now being considered a promising architectural approach for building Internet-based applications. One of the most critical and important aspects of software deployed on the web has always been the security of their architectures. However, despite considerable work in software architecture during the last decade, few research efforts have aimed at truly defining languages for designing and formalizing agent architectures and more specifically secure ones. This paper identifies the foundations for an architectural description language (ADL) to specify secure multi-agent systems. We propose a set of system design primitives and conceptualize it with the Z specification language to capture a "core" architectural model to build secure MAS architectures. We apply it on an e-commerce example to illustrate our proposal.

A transformational approach for developing multimodal web user interfaces is presented that progressively moves from a task model and a domain model to a final user interface. This approach consists of three steps: deriving one or many abstract user interfaces from a task model and a domain model, deriving one or many concrete user interfaces from each abstract one, and producing the code of the corresponding final user interfaces. To ensure these steps, transformations are encoded as graph transformations performed on the involved models expressed in their graph equivalent. For each step, a graph grammar gathers relevant graph transformations for accomplishing the sub-steps. The final user interface is multimodal as it involves graphical (keyboard, mouse) and vocal interaction. The approach outlined in the paper is illustrated throughout a running example for a graphical interface, a vocal interface, and two multimodal interfaces with graphical and vocal predominances, respectively.

During these last years, many researchers have proposed new alternatives for early interface design based on hand-sketch. But these new alternatives seem to be dedicated to obsolescence as they only offer the possibility to generate user interfaces for a single platform in a unique language. Indeed, in a context where the number of computing-platforms and system environments is exploding, new alternatives should be considered. This paper presents an innovating alternative with SketchiXML, a multi-agent application able to handle several kinds of hand-drawn sources as input, and to provide the corresponding specification in USIXML (USer Interface eXtensible Markup Language), a platform-independent user interface description language.